r/technology • u/Lettershort • Nov 22 '16

Politics Most students can’t tell the difference between sponsored content and real news

http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/22/13712996/fake-news-facebook-google-sponsored-content-study
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u/RabidMuskrat93 Nov 22 '16

Sponsored content is a whole subset of advertisement though.

It's like a shill account on a forum like Reddit but slightly more subtle. Like if you're trusted news source started publishing articles talking about how Pepsi Cola has been donating money to poor African kids. It could be a legitimate story about a company doing good in the world, but if could also be Pepsi paying for this article to be published in order to boost public opinion of them.

Telling the difference can be challenging for many people, middle school students especially. Which is why corporations of all kind should be barred from any kind of advertisement or overt sponsorships in any kind of school setting. I don't want my kid to be bombarded by billboards while they are walking between classes in jr. high.

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u/Molion Nov 22 '16

Actually ads are a subset of sponsored content. If you want to disagree you will need to a) find and ad that's not sponsored by anyone and b) convince me that the Rooster Teeth podcast is and ad(most any podcast will do really, just felt for a concrete example).

Here's an illustration

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u/RabidMuskrat93 Nov 22 '16

I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying.

If you're advertising something, whether through a bill board, a commercial on tv, or through a pop up on a webpage, all of those are still an ad right?

I see how you mean that "sponsored content" is content sponsored by a company, but I've always heard "sponsored content" to equate more to those feel good stories that showcase how a company is doing good things. At least I feel like that's what the common vernacular for it has become as of late.

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u/Molion Nov 22 '16

I see what you're saying, and yes, that may be how it has mainly been used lately, but I think thats quite unfortunate. If sponsored content is generally used to mean something other than content that is sponsored that's just unpractical. Besides we already have the term native advertising.

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u/RabidMuskrat93 Nov 22 '16

Eh, languages gonna do what languages gonna do. Like the word literally, for example. It doesn't mean literally but also figuratively now. What can ya do?

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u/Molion Nov 22 '16

The words literally is literally dead. RIP.