So. LJ ads. Spurred on by snugglebitch’s spotting of this anti-gay marriage ad on livejournal (via trouble),
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I logged out of LJ, opened up Safari (no AdBlock), and poked around.
I have a play with surfing, then interest searches. Surfing got me a whole pile of weight loss ads and a “Find your Vietnamese Beauty!” dating ad. I got lots of diet ads when looking around eating disorder communities, disability communities, and feminist communities.
A search for “trans” got me a “free tranny cam chat” ad, a search for “transgender” got me a “Pretty Shemales” porn ad, a search on “pregnant” got me a formula ad, a searches for “colic”, “baby vomiting”, “baby diarrhea”, “baby gastroenteritis”, and “reflux” got me ads for an astroturf front-end for a different infant formula manufacturer, people interested in “fat acceptance” are served ads to “Drop a Dress size or Two” or buy “Large Dog Beds” … and on it went. “Buy Queers On Ebay” in response to a search on “queer” was just hilariously inapt by comparison.
Here are a few screenshots. Sorry, you’ll need to expand your window/scroll, I think.
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Categories: ethics & philosophy, gender & feminism, social justice
Pamela Denoon Lecture 2016: Nelly Thomas 
Feminist burnout: the toll of continually responding to the news cycle 
Quicklink of the Day #2: #DestroyTheJoint excludes voices of women with disabilities 
Friday Hoyden: Gillian Triggs 
Hoyden About Town 
A very clear photoessay example of how keyword-algorithm advertising just doesn’t work for cyberspaces which deconstruct/challenge the social orthodoxies on sexuality and beauty using gender/race/class analysis.
It’s more sinister even than it seems. LiveJournal admitted that they have no control over the ads that are shown on their site. And it’s not just in response to searches – the diet ads are being shown on eating disorder support communities, for example. People have blogging about this over at dreamwidth, the site created as a refuge from LJ’s anonymized, commercialist rubbish. See my post http://seska-w-i-t.dreamwidth.org/1365.html .
“Did you know the long side effects of Psychiatric Drugs include Death?”
Unfortunately the “long side effects” of life include Death. But I have to say I love the random capitalisation.
I often have a chortle at the things the ebay google ads tell me I can find cheap on ebay, but some of these made my blood boil – pregnancy and colic ones and BABY DIARRHEA leading to infant formula???? Grrr. And a particular Grrr to baby diarrhea, since it’s so much less common in breast-fed babies…
Wow, they really know how to engage their target audiences, huh? LiveJournal can do a lot of harm with allowing those ads to be shown (ie: having diet ads show up on eating disorder communities) While they say that they have “no control” over what ads appear for which pages and so on, they do have control over what advertising company they go with that allows this to happen in the first place. The first step to show these companies that we, collectively, will not tolerate ads such as these being shown is to boycott them… Wait, what am I thinking? LJ only cares about the money they get from advertising, not the people who actually use their service.
Well, this is more grist to the mill for going over to Dreamwidth.