Slashdot Mirror
Shooting Yourself In the Foot, 21st Century Style
rueger writes "Right now there's an election happening in British Columbia. A desperate government is flooding Facebook with "Sponsored Post" spam (example) extolling the wonderful things that they plan to do if re-elected. There's one problem though. Every one of these posts is followed by hundreds of extremely negative comments added by people who either dislike the party in question, or Facebook spam in general. Desperate moderators are trying to control the 'discussion,' but seem to have no hope of doing so. What was thought to be a cool marketing tool has turned into a public relations disaster. Is this the worst use of social media in an election?"
It's not just about social media, very few even understands simple marketing.
You still see advertisements that try to force themselves onto people, not realizing that this creates a connection with discomfort and the product.
It's just an indication that the sheer ignorance on the part of government of the use of the internet in general and social media in particular is world-wide. Hell, the people who dreamed up the idea probably think spam is a good mass marketing tool. Politicians are the same everywhere - disconnected and with a blind sense of entitlement.
We denigrate politicians because they lie, but candidates who tell the truth don't get elected.
When polled, the US voting public wants the Federal budget as a whole to go down but wants each individual item to go up. Are you surprised that the representatives they elect can't pass a budget?
The BC government has done such a horrible PR job that I don't like them from the opposite side of the country. I detest the government here yet I can make a bigger list of reasons to hate the outgoing BC government starting with the Chinese miners.
This just confirms a pet theory that government needs to be wide open to the people. The internet is helping yet the BC government has thought that they could do what they want and somehow retain power by creating their own reality. This is becoming harder and harder to do but backroom deals still abound in most governments. Quite simply governments should not be able to hide almost any information. When I mention this to government people they say No No No that would prevent us from doing what needs to be done; to which I reply it would prevent you from doing what people don't want you doing.
On the minus side, it has become readily apparent that the internet's SNR has some... room for improvement. It's also pretty easy for moderately competent jokers to combine trolling skills with sock-puppetry, poll stuffing, etc, etc.
Even on parts of the internet where controlling the discourse is worth essentially nothing, some nutjob is probably wasting his life winning the edit war or posting about how he earns $68/hour working from home. If there were a location where politicians were actually listening(and, implicitly, money and power were available for allocation), you'd need explosives to cut your way through the astroturf...
Early internet had so many review sites that gave relatively unbiased information while the established players like PC Mag was seen to be basically shills. Eventually those review sites died or became shills or got lost in the noise of shill sites. Reviews in Circuit City, Best Buy, Costco etc all started out decent and died due to shills. Amazon seems to be fighting a losing battle with the shills.
Essentially the basic rule is this: If costs nothing to post a review or a message, expect to be overwhelmed by spam and shills. It is simply vendors adapting to the new medium. No way good samaritans would be able to keep up with the volume churned out by the vested interests and they will be lost in the noise. Bold prediction: Same fate will befall wikipedia, eventually.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is in Canada.
There's more than one "opposing party".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Sorry, this is a bold faced lie (or at least strongly misleading). First, even if you assume that the Fed has to buy treasury bonds (which they don't - think about the most recent QEfinity nonsense with MBS), the money supply doesn't have to grow. Many economists believe that a moderate rate of inflation (1-2%) is beneficial to economic growth (as opposed to slow deflation which would result with a constant money supply with a growing economy - see 1870-1900), but there is very little empirical evidence to support this position - it's taken mostly on (in my opinion, somewhat dubious) theoretical grounds relating to consumer and producer expectations. Further, even if you posited that the money supply must grow and the Fed must buy treasury bonds, there is still a huge surplus in government debt that would last 50+ years before we would run out of treasury bills/notes/bonds to add to the Fed's balance sheet.
You can make arguments as to why sovereigns should run deficits. The need to run deficits to grow the money supply is not one of them.
(Yes, IAAPHDE - I Am A PhD Economist)
This is the dangerous side to social media. Because you can't control the message, things can spin wildly out of control particularly if the numbers aren't extremely in your favor to begin with. If you're a small company with a small customer base, one negative comment, justified or not, can destroy you. A negative comment can quickly go viral and they you're completely borked. You have no legal recourse to punish the liars and set the record straight. If you have an enormous positive following, that works to your advantage because they will defend you when someone brings up a negative even if it is true.