Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/facebook-nixes-pseudoscience.html
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This is confusing – the marketers know it’s pseudoscience, and want to sell it anyway? (No surprise there) And/or Facebook categorizes its users this way? (Ditto) The implication though is that people are interested in it, i.e. that they know it’s pseudoscience, and yet someone’s trying to pitch colloidal enemas to them anyway. People who believe in the efficacy of colloidal enemas probably don’t call it pseudoscience.
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Facebook: making it easier to part a fool from their money since 2008.
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Why, Jim Bakker calls it “God’s Miracle Colloidal Enema™” and commands you to “stick it up your ass!”
Oh and if it burns, just have that other evangelical charlatan blow on it!
Seriously though, fuck those guys!
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The marketers know that FB users in that category are gullible idiots. It’s basically a “sucker list” that Zuckerberg provided to advertisers, although Il Douche’s list is still a lot bigger.
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And of course we know that when Facebook gets caught doing something stupid and selfish and greed-induced, that they will always and permanently correct the problem.
Mostly by not talking about it anymore.
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The advertisers selecting to advertise in a category marked “pseudoscience” are purely predatory. Astonishing that anyone would willingly click the box that effectively says, “Yes, I would like to engage in borderline criminal behavior.”
Users Facebook has flagged as interested in pseudoscience are the ones who engage with vaccine denial, colloidal silver, fish antibiotics, etc. They are born chumps. They will also buy bullion at twice the spot price, and click on clickbait headlines with titles like “one weird trick…”
I just looked through Facebook’s currently available targetable categories, and it’s squeaky clean. However, it wouldn’t surprise me if I only have access to a sanitized version of FB’s ad platform.
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This is probably the most valuable customer segment on FB. As @gracchus notes above, it’s a sucker list. Or as Blagojevich says, “This is a F***ing valuable thing. I’m not just going to give it away for free.”
But what will they rename it, I wonder? There were no obvious candidates just now when I browsed the list. I would like to advertise to these people. Gonna get a rabbit and start selling smart pills.
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Also known as The Republican Party.
I say let them keep it, but it has to display on the ads.
Won’t bother most of the marks being targeted, of course. “Look! It says ‘science’ right there in the title! It must be legit!”
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The example ad the article described was someone selling beanies to protect peoples’ brains from radiation. The company hadn’t chosen the label, facebook added it because the only thing they actually do for a living is help advertizers and misnformers (if those 2 can be seperated) find the right audience
thats depressingly unsurprising.
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Sorry to say, there are quite a few suckers on the left as well. When it comes to quack medicine, they may believe it for different reasons, but they still fall for it. If anything, they were the early adopters and the right only got roped in once people like Alex Jones realized that they would believe literally anything at all and saw dollar signs.
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That’s … an interesting idea, and not just for the ‘pseudoscience’ category, but for all of them. Why am I being shown this ad? What do you think you know about me that means it makes sense to serve me this ad?
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Somehow I tripped conditions on YouTube for Category: Hairy Body. Or perhaps it is Category: in need of hair removal.
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Maybe something like “Alternative Science”. You know, like “alternative medicine” (some of which has now been mainstreamed). Or more like the Trumpistas’ “alternative facts”.
It’s funny, I remember long ago first hearing the statement, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts”. It seems like the GOP has now nearly successfully gutted that because they all feel entitled to their own (alternative) facts, truth be damned.
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I read you Tinder profile and swipe right.
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Sadly true. There is an old Anglo-American tradition of quackery and pseudoscience.
Of course, The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/revolutionary-new-insoles-combine-five-forms-of-pseudos-1819565103
I’m no expert in the field, but it could be something to do with Protestantism. If you can have your own personal, unmediated link to the divine, why not to anything at all? Catholics probably respect expertise more because they are used to priestly intercessors. While that expert could be the wise woman who grows herbs, it could also be the village doctor, and, eventually, experts with academic credentials.
Americans seem to think academia is an elaborate scam designed to make their children difficult and contrary.
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I’m sure there are people who view terms like “pseudoscience” or “unfalsifiable” or “quackery” as code words used by academic shills raking in the bucks to cover up what they don’t want us to know, maaaaan!
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Facebook probably just removed Pseudoscience category and created a few new categories with less obvious sounding titles instead.
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