Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/27/sinclair-broadcasting-aired-a.html
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Free speech is protection from the government - based on the fact that saying “King George is a looney” would get you arrested and possibly hung at the time.
Free speech doesn’t protect you from the rest of your ‘common man’ from calling you an idiot - and more importantly is not something that guarantees you an outlet. Using “Free speech” as an excuse to pander lies and misinformation should result in your outlet being called to task, and is not cancel culture but in fact the only redress the public at large has to fight back against such bullshit.
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If you’re going to claim it’s a weapon you have to acknowledge it’s a really poorly designed weapon-- mutates fast, isn’t as lethal as smallpox or ebola, and if you’re going to make a viral weapon you have to have the vaccine ready before you use it or else you’re pointing the weapon at yourself.
Or as I said to someone who told me they heard it came from a lab in China, “Oh yeah? So tell me, which lab did the Black Plague come from?”
Viruses do exist in the wild, kids.
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I guess it’s to be expected that some greedy sociopaths will look at a global pandemic that’s killed more than half a million people around the world and ask themselves “how can I make this situation even worse?” But it’s still dismaying, to say the least.
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Sinclair is being horribly irresponsible. This is a classic case of “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre”, and it will get people killed. Dr Fauci has already received threats against him and his family, credible enough that he has been assigned a security detail.
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Yep - to be honest though - the best ‘fix’ for this would be to limit station ownership to a single station, and force those owners to be local to the community that is broadcast to.
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You mean the way it used to be?
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Off topic for this thread, but I encountered two Trump Pence 2020 ads while reading the article. I need brain bleach.
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To me this is criminal negligence that will likely result in needless deaths. Class action in waiting.
It strikes me that Covid-19 won’t be ‘real’ to some of these people until they themselves catch it and enjoy some of the more serious possible outcomes like kidney failure.
And even then - my guess is they will blame it on ‘seasonal flu’.
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I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that all the ideas that supposedly fall victim to “cancel culture” are backwards, unscientific, prejudiced, or otherwise awful.
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I take it these ads get fired by the browser and not the site right? @orenwolf - any comment?
Edit: I use a combo of Firefox, Fences and Ghostery on Win10 and don’t see these ads.The latter are plugins that can be installed on pretty locked down work PCs.
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I’m on my work laptop with work configurations. Hmmm…
I’m honestly surprised Sinclair would care about public pressure when it is clearly not coming from their target audience. Maybe some advertisers have called them.
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So they have not in fact “aired” it, right? The headline is incorrect?
I am not involved with ad selection or content. However, ad targeting is user-based (i.e., not something selected by Boing Boing).
That being said, if you get a “bad ad”, and trump ads probably qualify, forwarding a screenshot to badad@boingboing.net might help the ads team, depending on how the targeting happened (i.e., if it’s a category block we can do, maybe, but more likely it’s a specific ad network buy which we don’t control).
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Took my brain far too long to render that email as bad ad rather than ba dad. Do you secretly have rams receiving the emails.
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^This.
This constant insistence of grifting liars that spreading false bullshit conspiracy theories is somehow equally valid “speech”, and that people being misled is somehow a valid thing in a “marketplace of ideas” is now becoming a common line of conservative bullshit reasoning that is even more dangerous than the pandemic itself.
These bastards are normalizing and codifying openly ways to lie and couching their arguement terminology in capitalist economic jargon in effort to spread its supposed “legitimacy”.
It’s dangerous bullshitting- and it needs to be stopped from spreading.
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And… this is why I’m now convinced this country is totally fucked, whatever happens in the next four months (and now that Trump is going “full fascist” I’m convinced things are going to escalate to a total nightmare before the election). We’ve got a poorly-informed population, about 40% of whom have outed themselves as authoritarian followers and racists, being targeted by increasingly lunatic right-wing propaganda outlets masquerading as “news.” You can’t have a functional state, much less a democracy, under those conditions.
It’s only “irresponsible” if propagating right-wing disinformation and creating chaos isn’t their goal. And it pretty clearly is. They’re being malicious.
I’m seeing them everywhere now - including before and after anti-Trump videos on Youtube.
No, they did air (broadcast) it on at least one station, besides streaming it, but the wider airing that was supposed to happen this last weekend didn’t happen. At this point it’s unclear if it will, but it seems they’ve been sufficiently embarrassed that they won’t.
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I’ve found that I get ads all over when I’m not logged in, but once I log in most of them go away. Not sure if that’s by intent or dumb luck or some weird configuration thing on the user end, but I’m not complaining.
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Pretty much yes.
