• drev@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    4 months ago

    I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?

    It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy

    • IzzyScissor@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      4 months ago

      And remember, if THEY have thousands of bots that each ‘think independently’ but still end up downvoting your post en masse, then that’s totally fine. But if YOU try to upvote your post with one of your alts so it doesn’t get buried, that’s bannable.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        4 months ago

        To be fair mods did try to take action against that and they did have tools. How well they worked is not something I will pretend to even guess at.