Hacker News Reader

Comment by RickHull | Hacker News Reader

> The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it

Good point, but...

The advertiser mostly cares when "everyone" knows they advertise for Nazis. If it's just you who knows, no biggie. They don't want it to be common knowledge.

View on HN

Can’t they just give the advertiser the ability to control what kind of content they want their ads to appear alongside? Actually, don’t they do that already?

> The advertiser mostly cares when “everyone” knows they advertise for Nazis.

There are likely some advertisers who would have no qualms about targeting Nazis for advertisements, and little or no qualms about anyone knowing that they do either: criminal lawyers, divorce lawyers, mental health treatment services, drug and alcohol treatment services, certain kinds of charities (such as extremism prevention or anti-racism), etc.

It’s not just what content they’re next to, brands don’t want to be associated with certain types of content in any way. Because to a lot of consumers a brand is a part of their identity, and most people don’t identify with Nazis.

YouTube/Reddit/Facebook/etc are full of all kinds of crazy unhinged content - they may ban Nazis, but there’s many other species of crazy they don’t ban. But “A allows people (who go looking for it) to find crazy unhinged content of kind B” and “Company C advertises on A” are just completely unrelated facts in my head - and I think that’s true for most people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com