Education campaign on adtech companies on social media

Education
#1

Adtech companies avoid publicity. What they are doing each is usually pretty creepy. We could set a #hashtag and start little threads on Twitter (and Facebook? and Instagram? and …) simply describing individual companies. Name, what they do, how it works as building block in the ecosystem, why it is potentially dangerous, with follow-up tweet inviting everybody to add insights, do their own descriptions, and a link to our SAR page for this company.

The simple description of what each company does without much value judgement should be enough to make a lot of people think twice and get interested. Further provide a link to the company page on PDIO and link to tweets describing our SAR tool.

“Light is the best disinfectant.”

#2

I like it.

Why not do a precomposed tweet popup to help as well? “Tweet about this company!”
It could include the URL of the company, a hashtag, and some preform invitation. Do you see it?

1 Like
#3

Good idea and good reason to maintain a proper description. “Tweet link to this page.”
Do we have any instagram users? I think the overlap btw. Twitter and insta is small. This is another age cohort, that may be responsive to to this message, too.

#4

I really need to get working on some good JS framework to do all those little widgets better.

#5

I miss the word ‘someone’. You should not do this yourself, really. It consumes so much time.

Why don’t you try to “ask” the Twitter hive mind via a tweet from personaldata.io that you look for an ethusiast javascript dev, that would help you get some stuff done in the wikibase frontend? Worst case is, that nothing happens. But with an audience of 5000+, you should typically get a handful of matches.

2 Likes
#6

@Hanz0mon Not sure to understand what you mean. A tool like a bot that would automatically retweet items having SAR page? like https://twitter.com/parliamentedits who tracks Wikipedia edits made from Parliamentary anonymous IP.

#7

Thx @Genferei, kind of interesting. I guess that like all control mechanisms it is the fact that it exists which is the key ( but of course it’s easy to change IP)
Dumb question for @Hanz0mon : When I looked at some off_facebook_activity, there were some surprising (unexpected) results. It could be a prob if what I understand as a kind of ‘name and shame’ of Adtech companies popped up when using the sites of clients, who didn’t realise what they had signed up to (if that makes any sense ) ?

#8

No, not automation, a plain “marketing” proposals. Post (by hand) daily e.g. on Twitter about a specific adtech data controller (kind of data controller of the day calendar sheet). Either single tweet or min thread.
Basically making people aware that we collect this kind of information systematically on our site. Eventually people will also stumble upon it via search.
Before doing so, we check that the data for this item is okay and complete.
We can create a landing page for this campaign, so that people do not enter the wiki without any explanations and have a list of all posted items on this page with the current one on top. Simply to drive some interested visitors in our direction and show what we got (incl. SAR tool). We can give this campaign a name, e.g. DataGremlins :slight_smile:

#9

@Elizabeth, as I said it is nothing automated, just a stream of posts over time, e.g. on our personaldata.io Twitter, making some of our work visible to others (this account has >5000 followers, who don’t show up here, yet).

Imagine if we manage to funnel only 1% of the followers to the wiki and 20% of those start contributing. That would be >10 more active member on the forum!

And we do not even have to condem those companies in the description. A plain description of their key activity should usually be creepy enough. We just pull them into public awareness.

Once on the wiki, people will start exploring the links and understand what we do, and see the value. Some may start to either engage or use what they find (e.g. for SARs).

#10

@Hanz0mon Thanks for the clarification.

1 Like
#11

Thanks for taking time to reply - this whole thing is soooo complex (I mean like non-linear dynamics complex :wink: and I was pleased to find a lot of answers to my (non-formulated) questions in the techcrunch article by Natasha Lomas which PoD put on Telegram this morning.
In any case I should shut up until I’ve found time to put in some SARs myself.

…and also complex like I know very few people willing to take the time to click on anything other than “accept cookies” when they want to read an article online !

1 Like
#12

Haven’t read the article, yet. My “problem”: I do not accept the Yahoo terms and couldn’t find another way to read it. The consequence of walking away …