I have a friend who’s alcohol consumption has gotten out of control. Me and his other friends/family are planning an intervention and so I’ve been doing a lot of research/reading on the topic.
NEVER and I mean NEVER have I seen so many fucking ads for alcohol in my LIFE. Instagram? 15 ads in a half hour of scrolling reels. YouTube? Ads. Google results? Ads. Twitter? Ads.
It’s fucking everywhere and it’s SICK. I’m researching how to help someone stop drinking and I’m getting inundated with ads for anything from gin, beers, vodkas and more. I can’t even imagine having an alcohol issue and trying to find help for myself with the web being this way.
It’s fucking sick.
I had 2 interventions in my life and neither worked. In fact, they made it much worse for me.
I suggest that you go to AlAnon and learn a bit about alcoholism before trying anything (btw, AlAnon is not AA, but is a program to help non-alcoholics understand what they’re dealing with.)
Your friend is lucky to have you. Don’t give up on them. It truly is hellish, and they’ll need your support.
Can 100% support Al-Anon. Great program.
I’ve found with my own addictions that forcibly stopping one just causes a different one to start up.
The real solution for me has been healing trauma, resulting in baseline consciousness not being painful.
Many of the programs recommend therapy first. No one wants to drink themselves to death, even though it feels like that sometimes.
And weed helps…not advocating, just saying it helped.
Different people react to it differently and for some it’s very positive. It may depend what the underlying stressor is. People who have chronic pain often respond well to THC/CBD.
And it certainly has fewer ill effects than booze.
i smoke as much as the next guy but at this point it would be replacing one vice with another
But it’s replacing it with a much less destructive one, which can be beneficial
Most alcoholics use alcohol to run from difficult, unprocessed emotions. I was one of them.
Absolutely. There has to be some little glimmer of already wanting to quit for them to take the help seriously. I would absolutely recommend AlAnon as well. You can’t just force someone into treatment, and that’s pretty much what interventions try to do, on top of making the person feel guilt and shame which likely is why they drink in the first place. Being able to have a one on one, calm conversation about how the person is affecting themselves and others is probably a good route, because people often do not recognize they have a problem in the first place. It would not be surprising for it to end with the person getting angry and storming out, but it plants the seed in a more reasonable way than having everyone they know cornering them, humiliating them, and saying “go to rehab now or we never speak to you again.”
Source: in recovery, worked in the field.
The guilt and shame is brutal, and shouldn’t be used to try to change someone into behaving better. It’s like spanking you kids, which is illegal now (at least whew I’m at).
AA always gave off bad vibes to me because of the whole “surrender to a higher power” shtick
Same, but the community was great. Being around people that understand is so beneficial.
Lots of secular AA groups out there
Not in Texas seemingly lol
Lots of secular groups on zoom.
Don’t think that my father would be able to use zoom like that when he decided to go to rehab and got the basic AA give it all to God treatment.
It’s hard to know which are really secular. Some folks think that calling it “a higher power” makes it secular. A fig leaf over the word “god” doesn’t do it for me.
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+1 AlAnon is a good program. It shows how deeply ingrained alcohol is in our society that we have support programs just for people who know an alcoholic.
You can disable targeted ads on most platforms, which will make the ads you see less relevant.
However, you’re right—ads for alcohol shouldn’t appear when searching for information on quitting drinking. I recall a liquor store offering discounts on drinks in exchange for the sobriety tokens people receive.
Yeah I learned stuff was spying on my voice because I was talking to my wife about how I need to take a break from drinking for a bit to recalibrate my habits and then for several days literally nothing but alcohol ads. No searches were made.
If they can’t resist doing this then maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to advertise alcohol.
It’s possible that she looked up information about cutting down on drinking, and because you’re connected in the ad network system, you also got ads from it. They like to learn who is connected to who and target ads that way. Facebook is, as you might predict, one of the most notorious.
Na, it’s parsed from conversations. I don’t know why everyone always tries to explain the connection when it’s quite obvious your phone is designed to use your spoken words for ads.
I disagree. Consider the average internet user and how much they willingly give up about themselves online. Most of them use social media and have everyone they’ve ever met added on it, they post directly about what they’re doing and often who they’re doing it with, and they lend their engagement at things they like. They use Google for a search engine and don’t block ads.
So really, for the probably 80-90%+ of the population that captures, the massive surveillance network in place just at that level is perfectly sufficient to gleam anything they might want to know. Even if someone does protect their privacy, people they’re connected with still influence their profile through their lack of concern for privacy.
So really, with all that in place, what’s the incentive to have a top secret voice surveillance system built on top of all that? It would destroy the market for any phone doing it if it was ever proven. Why take that risk when you can get everything you want from all those other sources instead?
It’s not. On the one hand is however many people saying “it’s obvious!” and on the other hand is no evidence of network traffic transmitting audio data. Why spend all the power to transmit audio, autotranscribe, and parse for specific keywords when they already track your browsing habits and those of your housemates?
It’s decoded on the device with the dedicated audio processor built into every smartphone since about 2010.
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Is there any proof of this?
Listening to, and understanding, everything said within range of the phone should use noticeable processing power.
Yeah if I didn’t trust her to tell me specifically if she’d done it I’d’ve thought that. But she’s been there in the past herself and was less concerned than I was. Also she’d’ve definitely told me when I complained about the ads
There could also be cues from the rest of your observable behavior even if it wasn’t explicitly searched for. They have a lot of data to work with and your circumstances probably aren’t unique, maybe there are signs they are aware of that you wouldn’t be.
Bless you for using two different double contractions
I’dn’t’ve even noticed if you’d’nt mentioned it lol
Also, his purchases of alcohol may have made it to an advertiser. He may simply not have noticed he was getting ads until his wife talked to him about drinking too much.
The whole “phones are listening all the time” thing could be true, and wouldn’t surprise me, but to my knowledge no hacker or privacy monitor has ever found evidence that they do. Always just seemed more likely to me that people just expose information without realizing these systems are much more ubiquitous and complex than just microphones illegally listening.
Your friend is lucky to have you. Good luck, I hope everything works out for the best.
There’s actually a setting at least on Facebook to specifically disable alcohol and gambling based on some settlement a few years ago but they hid it really welll
I know this is four months old, but I’m getting nonstop gambling ads after googling how to block them and its driving me insane. I hate that I’m not alone in ad hell… I’ve lost people because of gambling addiction and it is RIDICULOUS that there isn’t a way to block ads for things that are dangerous, if they become addictive.
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Alcoholic here. Super bowl ads are toxic. All hail the protective ad blocker.
If you don’t block ads and you type things into searches about alcohol you will indeed get a lot of alcohol ads. The thing is though, I never got them as frequently when I was still drinking, or maybe never noticed them. Also I once got served ads for beer on a page about quitting booze lol, it seems pretty intentional even though it’s most likely not that targeted.
that’s why I pay to remove ads.
Sending mixed signals to programmers
!stop@believin
return True;
Interesting. I live in Poland and liquor advertisements are illegal here, in fact all alcoholic beverage commercials are banned except for beer (I think even with that there used to be some restrictions that in tv they can be only aired after 23:00 or 11 PM, I’m not sure if it’s still the case). According the law definition, it should also apply to social media and internet in general, but it might or might not be completely regulated (yet?). In general however, I don’t see such adverts and even beer adverts are quite rare, to the point that I forgot they could exist, just like cigarettes commercials.
Last beer advert I remember was some some billboard with 0% Free beer with raspberry flavor or whatever
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Facebook briefly offered you the option to select topics you didn’t want to see advertised at all, I chose alcohol and politics. Want to guess what 90% of my ads on that garbage site are?
I had the same experience. Those settings didn’t seem to change a thing.
This treats the symptom, not the illness.
This is a vaccine that will make you immune to the illness.
Most of my devices have all the relevant blocks and filters etc. my iPhone doesn’t and given I’m mostly in a few paid apps it hasn’t really been an issue in the past at all.
I really just wanted to call attention to how sick of an issue this is for someone who might be trying to help themselves.
Yes, it is a dick move. Companies don’t care about consumers, they care about sales and their brand. You could document this with some screenshots or a short video and send out an e-mail to a bunch of popular newspapers. If any of them pick up the subject, it could hurt those assholes.
Wait - are you really the real Blizzard?
Why did you do this to us?
I wish they had an official account on Lemmy because I’d like to ask them some questions:
- why do giant slugs and porcupines keep bound prisoners?
- why do mobs suddenly come out from underground? Just becasue it made sens with zergs, doesn’t mean it will make sens with everything
Don’t let me start talking about movement because it’ll turn into a rant.
