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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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“Brand safety” killed Jezebel

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.

Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/

Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:

https://text.npr.org/734303135

The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):

https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/

Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html

The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.

Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.

Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:

https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad

Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.

Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:

https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/

Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:

https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards

This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.

But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":

https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/

More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":

https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look

Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."

This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/

But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/

This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:

https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201

G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944

Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,

It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.

When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.

This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.

As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."

The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety

#pluralistic #jezebel #publishing #brand safety #adjacency #adtech #media theory #censorship #surveillance advertising #dynamic ad placement #quackspeak #Global Alliance for Responsible Media #garm #debated sensitive social issue #Third Party Safety and suitability #schizmogenesis #woke capitalism #duckspeak

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billspotts · 1 month

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State of Terror: Life After Venezuela’s Electoral Uprising

In a voice message to the ruling party leadership, Maduro summoned PSUV militants and his remaining supporters to defend his rule: “Coordinate with National Police (PNB) and Guard (GNB) to restore order,” he commanded. “We have to grab this by the head. Act immediately. Every little fire that starts must be extinguished.”

On the morning of July 29th, while the Comando por Venezuela celebrated a de facto triumph of more than 30 points over Maduro—after processing 73% of the voting tallies—demonstrators returned home under the watchful eyes and cannons of colectivos and security forces.

On July 28, Venezuela’s government—perhaps dazzled by its own misreading of the situation—became exposed to electoral reality. The barrio, emerging as a new agent of change, slapped chavismo in the face, forcing it to embrace the only version of sovereignty Maduro understands: the power to dictate who lives, who dies, and who goes to jail, echoing the words of Cameroonian social theorist Achille Mbembe.

In a context where hundreds of thousands of people volunteered to defeat Maduro at the polls and then protect the evidence of their collective will, the brute force unleashed since July 29 seeks to destroy the spirit and hunger for change that Machado’s campaign activated.

As Chávez statues were toppled and Maduro posters torn down, the government, from its trenches in Miraflores and Fuerte Tiuna, tried to convince international mediators that Amoroso’s announced result wasn’t up for discussion. At the same time, it turned on all engines of its war machine, including an overblown rhetoric that doesn’t even pretend to be logical. Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, and Jorge Rodríguez have labeled those who oppose them—from local politicians to foreign governments, even on the left—as Nazis or fascists, describing demonstrators as drugged criminals from the U.S. and cells from the international criminal organization Tren de Aragua.

A week after the election, human rights NGO Foro Penal confirmed 1,102 arrests, with 170 of them in Caracas. Monitor de Víctimas reported 23 murders so far, with colectivos responsible for at least 9, operating in total sync with State security officers.

Like paramilitary forces fighting a hybrid war, colectivos work as PSUV’s fist in the areas where the chavista State holds more economic and social power over a population now turning its back on them. Their priority is to defend their government sponsors at gunpoint.

The offensive reached the doors of those who took to the streets the Monday after the presidential election. A video from that day shows a man on a bike recording himself while chasing demonstrators, saying to the camera: “Here we are, prepared to defend peace and our principles. We want peace, but we are prepared for war. In Venezuela, it was our president Nicolás Maduro who won. Guarimberos (a slur for protesters) ran to hide in their homes. From now on, we take over the streets that have always belonged to us, not to oligarchs!”

Communal councils and what’s left of the Hugo Chávez Battle Units—PSUV grassroots structures forming a sort of parallel chavista State—have been ordered to identify, locate, and point out anyone who called out the election fraud in different communities.

Under this war logic, anyone who poses a threat to those in power becomes a target for colectivos and security forces: demonstrators hiding in safe houses, people who showed their voting tallies or denounced the fraud on social media, and community leaders and members of comanditos who promoted participation and defended votes for Edmundo González.

On Tuesday the 30th, in the densely populated (and formerly very chavista) 23 de Enero area, PNB detained four boys—three of them teenagers—who were banging pots on the eighth floor of a building. Caracas Chronicles obtained voice notes sent by leaders in communal councils in Distrito Capital. In one of them, a woman hoped that someone would “shoot escuálidos (classic chavista hate speech for opposition folk)” to get them in line “while Maduro decides to call the army. At least I saw colectivos giving them hell. If they catch anyone, they will make a pulp out of him… and they are hiding between our buildings.”

A WhatsApp chain message shared with neighbors in San José, in downtown Caracas, read: “We call on mothers, families: advise your kids and don’t help the Right. After all this, the opposition leaders wash their hands and continue their trips and lavish lifestyles while our young people fall under the weight of law and order. We can’t cry after that happens. Women, defend your households and protect them from destabilizing plans.”

Caracas Chronicles reached out to one activist who organized volunteers in Western Caracas on July 28, who has since gone into hiding along with about eleven colleagues. Colectivos started hunting for her the minute after the opposition rejected Amoroso’s results. From her hiding place, the woman sent videos showing how CICPC and DAET patrols have assisted colectivos in taking over the barrios.

DAET, which replaced the infamous FAES death squads, highlights the scope of Maduro’s policy against the poor, which has progressively mutilated human rights and living conditions for those with the least. Meanwhile, the regime sustains an oppressive minority of party militants, colectivos, CLAP clerks, police officers, and intelligence personnel with privileged access to institutional networks and State resources.

According to psychologist Andrés Antillano, these inequalities within low-income groups generate fear, distrust, and resentment in the barrio—where chavista groups impose the status quo by marking enemies and controlling those who criticize the government.

A noticeable pattern in this repressive wave has been the indiscriminate attacks on teens and young people who have known no other president than Maduro.

Last week, late at night, the DGCIM posted a reel on their Instagram account announcing their new “campaign” and security operation, “Operación Tun Tun,” with the hashtag #sinllorader (#nowhining). In the background, a song played: “Children take care! Please be aware. All that you’ve done will come to bear!”

“Operación Tun Tun,” which translates to Operation Knock-Knock, isn’t new. Diosdado Cabello first announced it on his TV show “El Mazo Dando” in 2017, during three months of Venezuelan protests, to target people he considered “terrorists.” This time, the DGCIM, along with other police forces like the CICPC, led by Douglas Rico, not only released this video with its intimidating song but also shared images with WhatsApp and Signal phone numbers, urging people to report anyone allegedly involved in a “physical or virtual hate campaign through social media.”

This operation targets everyone who worked on election day as witnesses or as part of a “comandito” (the opposition grassroots group involved in collecting voting records), those who protested, and even people posting on social media in support of González Urrutia, Machado, or anyone expressing disagreement with chavismo.

On Saturday night, Cabello showcased various Venezuelans detained under “Operación Tun Tun” across the country on his TV show, using the hashtag #PeaceHasArrived.

Other security forces, like the Táchira Police, published “wanted” notices with pictures of young men, labeling them “leader guarimberos.” Even before the elections, Nicolás Maduro had warned that there would be a “bloodbath and fratricidal civil war caused by the fascists” if he didn’t win on July 28.

In addition to raiding homes, various security forces, including DAET, PNB, GNB, and local police, have set up checkpoints in different Venezuelan cities to seize and inspect mobile phones.

The surveillance, targeting, and persecution of citizens extend to other social media platforms like Telegram. Public figures and activists have reported the existence of various Telegram channels created to post pictures of people involved in election day activities or peaceful demonstrations. Some of these channels, like “Caza Guarimbas” or “Controla las Guarimbas,” were shut down by the platform after being reported for promoting violence.

In these channels, users could see messages like “Edmundo is a killer” or pictures of young individuals accused of being responsible for hate crimes (as defined in Maduro’s Hate Law).

This manhunt has created a new environment in the country. People are deleting WhatsApp chats, activating disappearing messages, and sending important information to relatives abroad so they can spread the word about what’s happening inside the country. Some have had to leave their homes and find places to hide.

The situation has also changed how people gather in the streets. For example, during María Corina Machado’s demonstration last Saturday, journalists refrained from recording participants’ faces. Even Machado, who had recently expressed fear for her life in The Wall Street Journal, appeared in public covered with a hood before climbing onto a bus.

Understanding that loneliness and despair are fertile ground for totalitarianism, Maduro and his elite are trying to break the connections people have built, isolating citizens once again from the democratic cause—even more so those who directly promoted and defended the vote in the presidential election.

How can we fight this? If terror seeks to deny what happened at polling stations on July 28th and the intrinsic political condition of voters, the first step is to raise the voice of truth, convinced that, no matter the violence that followed, on that day, Venezuelans spoke with resounding clarity.

Secondly, being strong and resilient doesn’t only mean protesting in the streets. To remain active in defending the true results, we must protect ourselves, stay alert, and manage our energies carefully.

For those who risked their lives in the last several weeks and months of campaigning, protection from state terror means moving between hiding places and waiting for an embassy in Caracas to process dozens of refugee requests.

For others, staying in the streets protesting to the very end is just impossible. “Now, the end of this is in God’s hands,” said Richard, who volunteered on the 28th and went out to demonstrate in Catia the next day. “I’ve been running around on my bike and saw things are getting quiet again. We already took a huge step.”

#venezuela

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