Children 'Interested in' Gambling and Alcohol, According To Facebook (theguardian.com) 39
Facebook has marked hundreds of thousands of children as "interested in" adverts about gambling and alcohol, a joint investigation by the Guardian and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation has found. From a report: The social network's advertising tools reveal 740,000 children under the age of 18 are flagged as being interested in gambling, including 130,000 in the UK. Some 940,000 minors -- 150,000 of whom are British -- are flagged as being interested in alcoholic beverages. These "interests" are automatically generated by Facebook, based on what it has learned about a user by monitoring their activity on the social network. Advertisers can then use them to specifically target messages to subgroups who have been flagged as interested in the topic. In a statement, Facebook said: "We don't allow ads that promote the sale of alcohol or gambling to minors on Facebook and we enforce against this activity when we find it. We also work closely with regulators to provide guidance for marketers to help them reach their audiences effectively and responsibly." The company does allow advertisers to specifically target messages to children based on their interest in alcohol or gambling. A Facebook insider gave the example of an anti-gambling service that may want to reach out to children who potentially have a gambling problem and offer them help and support.
They know because... (Score:2)
...They can see which ads they click on. The real question is, why are kids getting such ads?
Or is there another mechanism that facebook employs to determine things about people...?
Re: (Score:2)
Or maybe, Facebook spies on everything possible everywhere, including offsite, and regardless of what term you use to refer to these particular human beings, they exhibit a factual characteristic of engaging with this kind of content.
Blaming that on Facebook is a tad disingenuous. Is truth not a defense?
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Truth should be a defense against slander or libel (though it isn't in Britain), but the offense here is something different. It may not be a legal crime, but it's approximately "assisting in the corruption of minors".
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I guess the next questions is: What do they do about it?
A kid clicks on an ad for booze. They know it's a kid. Do they go ahead and serve up the ad? Or do they send them a PSA about drinking?
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How about returning... nothing?
This is like those questions about self driving cars: do you hit the toddler in the road or the school bus in the next lane?
Neither, you just apply brakes. There isn't a good way to make a choice. You have been placed in a Catch-22. The only appropriate exit is to simply reduce your involvement as far as possible.
Re: They know because... (Score:2)
If they already knew it was a kid it was illegal to show the advert in the first place, so they're not likely to change it to some psa or whatever...
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At 16 my interests where girls, alcohol, cars, sports, and girls so I'm not really surprised by those numbers. The fact that they know that info and much more about everyone including kids using facebook is also not a surprise.
The realization that we know they know has probably made them double check and make sure that there are no alcohol or gambling ads showing up for minors on their service.
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So you are letting the bit slide, where they monitor and data analyse children to target them with peer pressure targeted advertisemnts. Don't buy the product and you are a piece of shit that should be targeted by other children and be put down as a loser.
Fuck off Facebook, stop analysing and targeting children with psychologically manipulative and socially destructive advertisements that serve nothing but greed and leave a trail of psychological damage in children's minds, you worthless fucking pieces of
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By gambling, do they mean lootboxes? lotto tickets? As for alcohol, of course they are. tell a kid they can't do something and that's exactly what they'll gravitate towards.
(obviously this only works for things considered taboo -- you'll never get a 5 year old to eat veggies by banning them from doing so.)
(full disclosure: in keeping with the spirit of the site and /. community, i could barely be assed to read the summary, let alone the article)
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When I was about ten, one of my father's friends showed me how to play just about every conceivable form of poker, including how to wager on particular hands
Soon, all of my friends and I had our own sets of decks and chips, and we could tell pretty quickly if cards were marked or somebody was cheating.
It finally paid off on high school ski trips when I fleeced the rich kids on the bus rides to the slopes
Coincidentally, the very same slopes were where we learned our early drinking skills
IMO, these are things
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>you'll never get a 5 year old to eat veggies by banning them from doing so.
Indeed. In our carnivorous household, the teenager is rebelling by eating vegetables. Not a joke.
worked great with broccoli, 3yo and 5yo (Score:2)
> (obviously this only works for things considered taboo -- you'll never get a 5 year old to eat veggies by banning them from doing so.)
Funny you mention that. I actually pulled that off with broccoli. I wouldn't let my three year old and five year stepdaughters have their broccoli dessert until they ate their other food. I was silently laughing my ass off during this. It worked for about a year.
Unfortunately I forgot about it years later when my had my biological daughter. She's five now, and score
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Easy Peasy
Just let your step-daughters babysit and they will undoubtedly try and pull the same broccoli trick on her
Re: They know because... (Score:2)
Well the kids also search those terms and talk about them with their friens.
Just I dunno, look up stats about UK underage drinking.
interested children (Score:4, Insightful)
yes, "children" are interested in gambling, smoking, alcohol, sex, drugs, rock and roll with disturbing lyrics...
and not a damn thing you or anyone else can do will change that.
But the main reason children smoke, for example, is not that they saw ads. They have a close relative or friend who smokes. Let's stop this stupidity of thinking that pushing buttons and controlling information on the internet is going to change human interest and participation in vices. It will not.
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Things also get a bit confusing if you make no differentiation between a 7 and 17 year old, both of which are described as "children".
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haven't seen any 7 year olds get a hankering for cask proof scotch from watching ads though
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Except when discussing the 2016 election -- then apparently pushing buttons and controlling information on the internet absolutely has an effect.
Are you seriously suggesting (Score:2)
My mom was a pack a day smoker. Died from it. Me? My brother? We never touched the stuff. And it's not for lack of options. My mom didn't care one wit if we smoked. It just never occurred to either of us that smoking was a thing to do.
Meanwhile go look up some of the history between Hollywood and smoking. Or Go ask Fred Flintstone [youtube.com] which brand her prefers to smoke.
Good thing we need not worry (Score:2)
All the kids around here are only interested in gambling or alcohol, so I guess we're ok, since this is only about children interested in both gambling and alcohol.
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This calls for help from . . . the government !
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Well, now that we realize how dangerous sex can be for children, the next step is to make it illegal for adults to have sex... for the children
At least that seems to be how politicians in the US react to any perceived threat
Shocked! (Score:3)
"Children interested in Playboy," says guy who mows fields near the forest in 1970s.
I was a child once. Before the internet was big (Score:4, Informative)
,br> So, with regard to this study. No shit sherlock. And what the fuck else is new.
I think the difference (Score:2)
The Algorithm Rabbit Hole (Score:2)
This is one reason why the internet and its algorithms are terrible for people in general. You search one time for a gambling site and you are then reminded for the rest of your life about these things.
Outside of the internet people mostly have a choice to tempt themselves at say the liquor store, but probably don't have to drive by a bright flashing sign every day if they didn't want to. Online? Companies pay to throw fancy ads designed to temp you with your own vice. This can come in the form of ne
Well no shit (Score:2)
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It's one thing for teenagers to gamble, it's a totally different thing for a casino to push targeted ads at them.
Interested (Score:2)
Interested in engaging in gambling and consuming alcohol or interested in learning about self-destructive and/or addiction behaviours and empowering themselves to avoid them? Those are not the same thing.
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they probably are the same thing to facebook's ML algorithms. pleb management ain't easy.
In UK charades have slots for kids (Score:2)
In UK charades have slots for kids
Also in the news... (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:1)
Children on Facebook? (Score:2)
Why TF are children allowed on Facebook? They're not legally capable of giving informed consent & clearly their parents don't understand the implications of surrendering their children's personal information & web habits to Facebook, otherwise they wouldn't do it. Facebook should put a "Herod clause" https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com] in their TOS page for parents to click on just to see how uninformed the consent really is.
Of course they are... (Score:3)
All kids are interested in things which they're not allowed to have...
The more you try to restrict things or hide them from kids, the more they will actively seek them out.
On the other hand if you give a kid a beer or other alcoholic drink, they will probably find the taste disgusting and lose interest.
Facebook is "interested in" (Score:2)
children