I'm not completely sure this is just political people. Up until recently I only got ads for kickstarter doodads and airtable, but then it suddenly switched to gun stuff. I don't browse any firearm or political communities, haven't bought stuff, don't watch firearm youtube videos, haven't even been window shopping.
There were 5 million new gun owners last year. I think the ad networks just view it as a highly probable click since so many people are suddenly showing interest in firearms that weren't before. Especially for people in my demo/geo... I am white and rural.
When I was working in the machine shop business around 2016 another shop owner called our shop asking if we had any work to sub out. I was surprised because his shop was running at max capacity the year before, making gun parts. Apparently when a republican becomes president the gun parts market dries up; when a democrat wins, the market booms.
I think the arms retailers are having a boom right now and have plenty of money for ads.
While historically that has been somewhat true, 2020 saw an extreme rise in gun sales due to covid, mass protests, and tons of growth in both right and left wing militias.
Relatively rare in modern American politics, but not unheard of. In the 1960s and 1970s left wing militias and terrorism was a pretty common thing. A great example of this is the Weather Underground, who ended up bombing a lot of people. Whether or not you’d call these groups “militias” or “terrorist groups” probably depends on who you ask, but they certainly were armed.
It’s gotten a bit mixed up lately, but historically left wing militias made more sense than right wing militias. Left wing groups are usually in opposition to this form of government and therefore have a lot of things they’d like to change with force if necessary. Historically right wing groups usually wish to preserve (to whit, conserve) things as is, which usually doesn’t require militias per se. Anti-government right wing militias are historically speaking, kind of weird, even though they’re the norm since Ruby Ridge or so.
There are a lot of variables that go into those ad network decisions. Are you in a red state or a localized area where guns are particularly popular? Are you friends likely to buy guns? Do you buy other crossover product categories that gun owners also tend to purchase (ex. certain survival or camping gear)? Lastly, price per bid and volume... If nobody else is targeting you, or not paying enough to target you, the untargeted ads might make their way to your feed if they're bidding high enough or if facebook is simply trying to fulfill their ad volume.
Could be similar as when the covid lockdowns, mass layoffs and advertisment budget cuts started, I suddenly got bombarded (where it passed the ad blocker) with ads on how to rapidly become a millionaire by investing in stuff from home and similarly sketchy products/services.
I think could really be a risen interest in the gun topic within that demo and/or other companies not targeting them as much currently in the US while other see oportunity to sell more in this moment?
Same. I've been seeing tons of body armor ads on YouTube since the insurrection attempt. I am definitely not the target market (nor is the area I live in) and these ads seem specifically targeted toward people who are already into that stuff (or want to feel like they are).
They are spending more money on ads because it's a good time to sell more. People are exposed to enough fear, unrest, and conspiracy theories that many of them only need to see a few ads to make an emotional purchase decision.
As a funny confluence, body armor carriers make fantastic weighted vests. Rogue sells both a ESAPI compatible plate carrier and non-ballistic plates for endurance training. If one was so inclined you could either put armor in your rogue carrier (they used to just be 5.11 carriers), or use actual steel armor during training because they’re heavy.
If you are selling related stuff(belts, holster, vest, gun case etc), be prepared to have your fb ad account banned often(as the algo will likely (mis)-categorize you into selling weapons).
Advertisers in this space generally are very good at 1) cloaking, 2) renting or purchasing ad accounts.
both are against fb policy.
But in the end, as long as there is a positive ROI, and there is a way to circumventing the system, people will continue to do that. I don’t see how that’s fbs fault.
Maybe they could address the whole "there is a way to circumventing the system" thing? I mean, they own the system, so they should probably be responsible for any circumvention.
Pretty sure its unskilled low paid labor humans clicking yes or no for fb ads. You would not believe what things i managed to get trough. My account was only later deleted because i was advertising self made cotton masks. Which for some reason raised red flag suddenly
It's a much harder problem then it appears. Similarly to security, it's a cat and mouse game with the people who are trying to game the system, and developing solutions to catch them without too many false positives.
They're not circumventing the system, they're circumventing the false positives of the gun-detection algorithm. As the parent pointed out, advertising these gun-related things is explicitly allowed by Facebook.
I guess so. It's not as if there's anything morally wrong with playing the game of hide-and-seek that Facebook created. No laws are being broken and nobody's being harmed.
Why does facebook do this rather than let third party advertisers advertise? I thought they got most of their money from third party advertisers, not selling their own products.
Note - gun sales are very strong in the US. Antifa / BLM / Armed protestors.
>Why does facebook do this rather than let third party advertisers advertise?
I think that's exactly what FB is doing, to be honest. They are simply letting third party advertisers advertise.
Historically, dem president in power has always been an indicator of increased spending on guns (because hardcore gun people become afraid that the dems will make guns more difficult to purchase, so they stock up). And increase in gun sales means increased budget (including ad budget) for gun-related businesses. Higher ad budget for gun-related businesses means more ads for gun-related businesses popping up on everyone's feed, as they keep outbidding other ads.
Combine that with the fact that a lot more people in your social network graph became more interested in guns for various reasons over the past year (protests on both sides, covid, dem president, etc.), and you have just massively increased the probability of seeing an ad for a gun-related business.
> They are simply letting third party advertisers advertise.
I don't think it's quite that simple. Facebook controls the juxtaposition of ads with content, and with each other. This can reinforce the power of the individual ads, or attenuate it. In this case, it's pretty clearly creating a "caravan" of ads because that's more effective than letting each stand alone.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Facebook, but I was in storage. It gave me no particular insight into how the ad system works. This is just based on general knowledge of how human psychology and ML work.
>Facebook controls the juxtaposition of ads with content, and with each other. This can reinforce the power of the individual ads, or attenuate it. In this case, it's pretty clearly creating a "caravan" of ads because that's more effective than letting each stand alone.
Oh, totally agreed on this one. FB fully controls the layout and where ads are displayed. When I said that FB doesn't control things, I meant that they don't control and decide which ads get shown to you, it is all down to what advertisers advertise, and whether you fall under those specific target audiences.
So what is the argument here? Facebook should manipulate their advertising marketplace to prevent this? You can buy ads to sell your gun supplies and body armor but when it comes to targeting the ads, you can't choose the demographic groups that are buying this stuff up like it is going out of style?
I think Facebook is awful, but this how their business works. I can't see them going out of their way to not serve their customers and not make money, outside of public outcry or government regulation forcing them to.
I'm not sure GP is suggesting anything, and I know I'm not. These are just observations about how things actually work. The fact that certain groups of users get "bombarded" with ads for certain categories does not indicate intent or interference, as some here have suggested. It just means the system is doing what it's designed to do, which is to optimize the effectiveness and efficiency of serving billions of ads to billions of people.
Oh, I think you misunderstood, I am fully in agreement with you here, I wasn't proposing a change. I was just answering to a comment to clarify an earlier point.
The specifics I mentioned are not something that I am proposing as a target for a change, because, as you said, this is how their ad business works, and it seems pretty fair.
Sorry, that was an awkward way to phrase that. I was addressing the thread as a whole, not your specific comment.
What I mean is that this is the predictable and proven behavior of Facebook, so is this a target for change now that we don't like this particular result? Or should Facebook be somehow regulated to prevent this type of behavior generally?
How much can one stock up on guns? Every 4-8 years when the political cycle changes they stock up but after a few cycles the demand should grind to a halt. It's not like guns are advancing a lot either.
So I really wonder if republicans are scared when a democrat is in office and subsequently buy guns because of that or whether they are scared into buying more guns by mere marketing.
>How much can one stock up on guns? Every 4-8 years when the political cycle changes they stock up but after a few cycles the demand should grind to a halt. It's not like guns are advancing a lot either.
A lot of people who own guns also collect them. It is kind of a hobby. Guns might not be advancing, but people like having multiple different kinds, swap attachments, get some rare handgun from WW2 era from Czechoslovakia, etc.
Plus, it isn't all just about guns themselves. A lot of it is in the adjacent stuff, like ammo (which inevitably runs out, if you go to a gun range on a regular basis).
I prefer to think of it similarly to an audio gear enthusiast hobby. How many headphones/amps/synths/keyboards/guitars/etc. one might need? People spend enormous amounts of money on audio gear for decades, without actually "needing" most of it, and it isn't like the actual acoustics or technology in audio changes that much (with exception of a few specific categories, like midi controllers).
>So I really wonder if republicans are scared when a democrat is in office and subsequently buy guns because of that or whether they are scared into buying more guns by mere marketing.
I don't know about you, but I have plenty of politically left-leaning friends who bought their first firearms this year. So, I think, covid and protests are, at least partially, definitely fueling that increase in sales all across the political spectrum.
I think what's been seen is after videos of the protests and buildings burning etc there is a crush of non-protestors running to get guns.
Locally there may be also a sense that at least in some jurisdictions policing has decreased and/or crime has increased - ie, you are more on your own now - faith in govt is maybe a bit diminished.
And now of course some of the right wing protestors are showing up heavily armed - but I think they always bought guns because they often seem like gun nuts.
It's a weird thing since I have to imaging people that might buy that kind of thing already have it, or would be searching for it on other forums ( I have ).
It’s bombarding me with body armor ads too. I’ve never searched for or talked about guns, qanon, or election stuff on my fb browser.
Not sure this is specific to one political group.
Shouldn't it be "advertisers are targeting rightwing Facebook users with..."? I was under the impression that it was the advertiser who chooses the target audience.
The biggest myth out there is that FB is somehow detached from the ads they permit on their website because of "it's the algorithm" or "we're just a platform".
The people who build FB's ads platform have their performance judged by metrics like revenue, eCPM, and internal relevance scores.
Building capabilities to add arbitrary human-defined rules into those optimization functions only makes their jobs more difficult and is a drag on hitting team targets. I'm curious why you think they're incentivized to do so.
Drug dealers and human traffickers have their performance judged by their superiors, and are under constant pressure from competition. Law enforcement only makes their jobs more difficult and is a drag on hitting team targets.
> "A few months into maintaining my Trump online identities, I started feeling that I needed to buy guns. I knew it was irrational and impractical given my lack of training and urban lifestyle. Nonetheless I was convinced I needed them. When I told my girlfriend, her perplexed response made me realize how deeply my mind had been manipulated by my pro-Trump Facebook feeds."
Exactly the kind of effect Facebook is selling, though not always firearm-related, of course.
The perfect advertising machine is a mind-control machine. It makes you want things you didn't want before with 100% effectiveness.
To the extent thay Facebook spends billions a year on building such a machine, we should believe that they have seen some success beyond a traditional advertising channel (such as TV ads).
Most of the smartest people of my generation have dedicated their lives to building super-computers to point at peoples' brains and make them want to buy things.
I suppose it's marginally better than fractionally growing somebody else's pile of money.
Not many cultures have ever been free from widespread pervasive detachment from reality. By default, that's religion, though some political ideologies and superstitions have also filled that need. If you really don't like it, you probably don't like humans. And I tend to agree, humans have a fault in their brains causing irrational beliefs, but it probably serves some more valuable purpose than being right.
While I don't really know anything about Qanon. I guess it provides a sense exclusive group membership, similar to flat-Earthism. Not just anybody can join for the same reason not just anybody can suddenly believe a goddess molded a living child from the dirt she scraped off her body.
I see these waves of ads for particular categories often on Facebook. Low-alcohol or non-alcoholic cocktails are still going strong, though they've been eclipsed by ads for a very particular kind of faux-athletic shoe (pretty sure they're exactly the same shoe even though it's a dozen companies). I have to admit, after a while I sometimes do get a bit curious. The frequency itself makes some part of my brain think this must be A Thing, and that I must pursue The Thing, even though my rational brain knows it's entirely otherwise. It's a powerful effect. Whether intentionally or not, I think Facebook's ad-selection algorithms create these "category waves" even across multiple products and vendors because they do work. Therefore it's not surprising that such a wave related to the most controllable of minds is the biggest of all.
I don't believe the author's bizarre story that, while pretending to be a Trump supporter on the internet, he was brainwashed into wanting to buy a gun by nefarious advertisers. People are susceptible to advertising but we aren't that susceptible.
I bet the author is very concerned about "internet radicalization". I bet he's so concerned that he began to feel the stirrings of his own radicalization while pretending to support Trump on the internet. The article is a fantasy brought on by what the author expected to feel.
All respect, but if you didn't find the part of the article you quoted funny, your bullshit barometer needs to be recalibrated.
I stopped reading when I reached that part of the article. The way it was described made it unbelievable to me; That ads made the author feel "convinced [they] needed them". The author is being melodramatic throughout the entire article.
> People are susceptible to advertising but we aren't that susceptible.
I know a guy who bought a $500 axe (for chopping wood) from one of those "be a manly man" e-commerce sites that popped up a few years ago. He had never chopped wood before, and to this day he never has chopped wood. Ads convinced him he wanted it.
The same is true of all the ads from those companies, selling beautiful, sturdy compasses or hunting knives that never get dull.
Guns can be beautiful, well-made objects. They can make someone feed safe and prepared. I don't see any reason an ad couldn't convince someone that they want/need one, especially if they're seeing dozens of ads a day.
There is a reason why commercial companies spend a lot of money on ads. They work. A lot more than people want to believe. Ads tell you how to be a man, how to be successful and admired by your peers, how to be attractive to potential partners, how to secure your future etc. Repeat it enough times and you will start to believe it. You probably believe that you need to eat meat for protein right? And that you should drink milk for calcium right? All BS successfully programmed into you through ads.
Pretty much this. I highly suspect this is just a matter of advertising chasing ROI.
Firearms, ammunition (if you can even find it), plate carriers, plates, optics, NVGs, holsters - all of it is selling for at least 200% what it was one year ago right now. Everyone running ad campaigns is seeing ROI > 3 and dramatically increasing spend.
Once bids rise to the point that ROI is normalized, we'll see less of this.
> people rush to buy guns whenever the specter of gun control comes up
And it's mostly in their head. The right was fired up for eight long years driving up the price of guns and ammo while Obama was president, meanwhile he never made even a token effort at gun control.
Would you mind revealing that page? I am on the opposite end of the political spectrum but I hold great value in people who are honest about what they are and I’m always reevaluating my positions.
I’m not trying to put you on the spot. Feel free to ignore this message.
It won't matter. The cause and effect are reversed. They're getting ads because many are actively buying weapons and armor, fearing that the government is going to become authoritarian communists or something. At least, that's what I understood from talking to right-wing friends.
What makes you think the guy in the ad is a "suburban dad"?
These companies sell to police, private security companies, military, and yes civilians. That segment of the ad looks like its targeted to more of a private security/police application.
Not a chance. Cops and security don’t generally carry ar-15’s and those that do certainly are using locks. The site also doesn’t mention a single law enforcement client which is something they would be bragging about.
Maybe it’s because I’m a Texan but suburban dads are probably the largest gun owning demographic. Ive so many engineers show up to the range with a $4k ar-15 and shoot a couple hundred bucks in ammo. At least before covid shot prices through the roof.
You’re in for a surprise if you ever look in a patrol car. Every agency I know of, even in a very rural state, has an AR as standard equipment - either in the cabin, or in rare cases, in a trunk lid mount.
Most of those are pistols, which is a separate part of kit.
The end of that list shows the M4 carbine - which is an AR-15.
In popular vernacular, an “M4” is a shortened version of the “M16”, which is the military version of the “AR-15”. Armalite originated the design and Colt licensed it.
There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the high points.
People at HN proclaiming all FAANG companies are equally bad, here’s another feather to the hat. All of them are bad but if u remove the problems at those companies, their core business model can still survive except Facebook. It’s business, at its heart is creating polarization and alternative realities.
Yesterday I googled "how to measure a chainsaw bar" and got targeted by a clothing company running a sale for tactical clothing, including what I can only describe as domestic terror outfits. It was striking to me to type in a single atypical search term and then be immediately cast into a completely different advertising cohort.
There were 5 million new gun owners last year. I think the ad networks just view it as a highly probable click since so many people are suddenly showing interest in firearms that weren't before. Especially for people in my demo/geo... I am white and rural.