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Meta to introduce Ads on Threads in 2025 in move surprising no one.
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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No, it's not. Ads can't federate. Threads has no control over my Mastodon feed and Lemmy can't interact with Threads at all. Following Threads accounts from Mastodon is effectively an ad blocker.
Might be a stupid question, but can't threads just post ads as "posts" via activityPub? On mastodon they would appear as toots?
Was just remembering how reddit introduced ads as basically promoted posts and recall facebook doing the same.
I sure fucking hope not.
Ads in Instagram are posts in the timeline from accounts you haven't followed. Ads don't show when you visit a profile and browse its images. So for example a post by Coca-Cola might appear in the main feed even though I never followed it but it has a little "sponsored" marker in a corner to indicate that it's there because Coke paid for it and the ad placement algorithm thinks that I might be interested in that product. As Threads is a spin-off from Instagram, ads there will surely follow the very same model. Sure, you might be able to follow Coca-Cola's Threads account from Mastodon and see the post promoting their drink that way but Threads just cannot place targeted ads on Mastodon because they don't control that feed.
Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense for targeted ads for sure. Still a bit worried about hashtags being used for ads since I follow a lot of hashtags on mastodon and usually have a quite a nice "organic" feed compared to other social media.
Coca-Cola could have an official profile on mastodon.social and use hashtags there as well. Whether corporations use hashtags or not in their "regular" Mastodon posts has nothing to do with Threads.
Also Mastodon has user-level features to restrict unwanted content to show up in your feed ranging from hiding boosts up to blocking the entire instance:
And since Lemmy cannot interact with Threads content at all, defederating Lemmy instances from Threads makes even less sense. One of the big Lemmy instances blocks Threads but doesn't block CSAM instances. Insane priorities their admins have.
Appreciate the thorough explanations, thanks!
The last part is fucked up, yikes...
How do you know that Threads won't inject ads as posts?
Ads in Instagram are posts from accounts you don't follow. Threads can't make you follow promotion accounts you don't want to follow.
Depending on where they want to sit in the scumbag chart, there's no technical barrier stopping them from selecting threads-hosted accounts with high metrics and injecting advertisement posts under their handles.
Remember, the rule is "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
Threads is doing this. Kicking them to the curb regardless of the cost is the only solution.
Threads had more users than the entire non-Threads fediverse within a day or two. Mastodon is not the competition.
That would be A) identity fraud because it would be my favorite fair trade drink endorsing Coca-Cola without the ads being clearly separated as required by many jurisdictions and B) not targeted advertising in any way.
Even if Threads posts illegally embedded extra ads: Users could just opt not to follow Threads accounts. Threads cannot just magically place ads in the feed. That's impossible.
I'm sure they could find some way to have the terms of service agreement include a paragraph on how a handle is the property of Meta and not a user identity.
Business accounts can be exempted from injected advertising.
Post the ad as an image attachment and put the advertising disclaimer within the image? There's a lot of ways they can make an ad disguised as a post, and not all of them are as easy to filter out as a quick text search.
If @OutdoorsyOdin posts content about hiking and mountain climbing, you can make a reasonable guess that the subscribers are going to be interested in that kind of activity. It's not targeted to a specific user, but it's good enough to serve ads targeted at specific lifestyles or hobbies.
Exactly.
Anyways, this whole thing is to show that they could try to enshittify their fediverse integration if they really wanted to. There's no technological barrier preventing them from sending ads through ActivityPub.
Threads has no influence on the terms of service on Mastodon. So no, Threads can't allow to misrepresent profiles on Mastodon.
From my previous comment:
ActivityPub literally will not let them impersonate accounts from other instances. That much should be obvious. The topic is about them impersonating their own users and using that to push ads through federation.
No, that's not the topic. The topic is ads being placed in the fediverse in a way only defederation could block. Even if Meta silently making posts in the name of my favorite organic orange juice advertising Coca-Cola was legal (it's not), it would be easily solved by simply not following any Threads accounts. Also, Lemmy cannot interact with Threads anyway, so Lemmy servers defederating from Threads is completely pointless.
No, that's not legal. That would violate copyright, consumer protection, competition laws, and whatnot, at least in the USA and the EU. Mastodon users (!!) must be explicitly aware that a post is an ad, not the brands ticking off an EULA on Threads. Therefore Mastodon users could decide to follow a brand account were products are promoted (just as they can right now if that brand has a regular Mastodon page) but Threads cannot legally impersonate one account on Threads to advertise another account. That's not a grey area.
I didn't set a timer but it took me at most a single-digit number of minutes to find documents and announcements about the FTC tightening the rules about deceptive advertising several times throughout the years.
Let's go with your idea of what the topic is for a second: have you considered how advertisement posts could appear in search results, hashtags, or the explore section? Or what if they decide to screw with the normal process and artificially inflate the number of boosts and favorites for advertisement posts? Okay, the solution is to simply have your instance users refrain from following any Threads accounts so the posts don't show up anywhere—which is effectively defederation.
Irrelevant to what I'm saying.
Copyright to what? A person's name? A small string of characters that is a "handle"? None of that is copyrightable.
Doot Doot @SomePerson@example — 4h
Looking for gifts in time for the holiday season? Head on down to Best Buy to pick up some amazing deals on Black Friday!
-- This is an advertisement shown to you by Meta. Click here for more info. --
As I previously mentioned, corporate accounts can be excluded to remove running afoul of competition laws.
As with my example toot above, that took all of 15 words. They don't need to be deceptive about what is or isn't an advertisement to push that shit through the ActivityPub protocol.
Your whole argument is predicated on the idea that a (personal) account on Threads is either owned by its creator, or is associated with a trademark. Furthermore, there are a number of different approaches they could take to argue that the ActivityPub support provides access to a feed of content, and not an individual identity.
In any case, you're repeatedly glossing over the fact that my original point was to say there isn't a way to prevent it AT THE PROTOCOL LEVEL.
Considering that I've replied to another person with my explanation and got very positive feedback, I certainly know better than you. You're not the person I've replied to. You interjected and then tried to educate to me what my comments are about.
Any brand account on a regular Mastodon instance would be the very same.
Mastodon doesn't have an algorithmic timeline, so that would lead to absolutely nothing.
Relevant to the comment I've initially replied to.
Nope.
No, I made several good arguments, you just moved goalposts and declared they don't matter.
My original comment was a comment. The only reason it continued is because neither of us seem to be content with letting other people be confidently wrong.
Now imagine that it comes from a non-brand account that you follow. You have an ad. On your Mastodon instance. Federated by Threads.
Let's address the elephant in the room: the parts of Mastodon that I previously mentioned but were deemed to be out-of-place goalposts. Here, I even did the research:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/27965ce5edff20db2de1dd233c88f8393bb0da0b/app/models/trends/statuses.rb#L103
Trends use both the boosts and favorites count for calculating scores.
Although it doesn't solve the issue of ads being propagated in the first place, I will admit that having the option for manual admin approval is a nice mitigation, though.
After coming back and fully re-reading this thread again, I'll give you that.
Let me rephrase that without hyperbole: you gave them the ability to do what they want to do with your copyright.
https://edit.tosdr.org/services/219
"Very broad copyright license on your content." "You maintain ownership of your content."
Let's see...
You are correct that ads on Instagram are posts.
You are also correct that the federation protocol can't force you to follow users, and that ads won't show up in your feed unless you are subscribed to the user. You did not answer the user's question asking if you knew that "threads won't inject ads as posts."
You are not correct in that "ads can't federate". I pointed out that the federation protocol doesn't prevent an instance owner (Threads) from sending out ads as posts under any account hosted under their domain.
That was a technical argument for how they could actually federate ads if they wanted to. The discussion should have ended there while it was about the extent of what they could do to overreach in the fediverse. You were the one who decided to move the goalposts by bringing copyright and advertising standards into it.
My follow-up comments with shoddily-explained examples of how Meta could try weaseling out of consequences by abusing terms of services and pedantically following the letter of the law over of the spirit evidently isn't a successful way to communicate a point. All of that crap was to say that Meta does not respect the law when money is to be made. They have been fined for prioritizing ad money over data collection laws and even antitrust laws. They even got away with blaming their advertising platform approving and nearly publishing COVID-19 misinformation ads on automation. If they were to consider the potential profits to outweigh the risks from getting fined, they would do it and try to lawyer their way out of being held accountable.
If the direction of our discussion were to continue, you're going to disagree with me, I'm going to disagree with you, and we'll both come out of this wasting more time. I would prefer that neither of us waste more time on this, though.
As long as you are, I'm more than happy to call this a misunderstanding over whether Theads "can" or "will" use ActivityPub to distribute ads turned petty disagreement and move on. Agreed?
Never underestimate facebooks capacity to enshittify. If they want to send ads as posts they will make a way. In principle the fediverse should oppose for-profit-line-go-up fuckheads, it's always the same bullshit.
Ads already are posts, as I wrote but the main feed algorithm is not in their hand, it's the local feed of mastodon.
If users aren't permitted to follow brand accounts, they're just being driven into the hands of BlueSky. Your attitude isn't helping at all.