AOL oversteps the mark
I don't know what AOL think they are doing with this campaign, but you may have seen it on TV. Some consultancy company has come up with a shameful scaremongering and misleading scheme at AOL's behest, about how good or bad the internet is, and invites you to discuss that topic, unsurprisingly, on AOL's own site. There are a good couple of breakdowns of it on Infowars and Prison Planet respectively.
I guess the strategy of years of spamming everyone to death with their CDs, and being rightfully regarded as a joke by all serious internet users just wasn't enough for AOL. But what they are doing now is both extremely disingenuous and monumentally dangerous, in effect, trying to manufacture the premise for, invoke and then preside over, a hazardously political book-burning scenario.
Their pernicious and inflammatory cloth-headed campaign sets up a series of false debates intended to agitate you into participation on their website, thereby validating their pantomime and AOL's assumptions about your intelligence as a future customer. Meanwhile on their page, in their 'internet is bad' video, images of Big Brotheresque body scans are juxtaposed between footage of Osama Bin Laden and the Ku Klux Klan. (I swiftly filtered out this entire garbage with adblock before I even finished watching it).
Of course you have to provide an email address in order to participate in this enlightening 'discussion' they have kindly set up for you, and in doing so, no doubt, they will be contacting you after you leave your furious but inconsequential (to them) comment to send you another one of their crappy worthless CDs.
AOL, who have been gleefully exploiting their net newbie racket for well over a decade (and way longer than that), have now suddenly proposed that the net has just appeared and is indoctrinating you and your kids with porn, 'hate', and 'terror', whilst encouraging the 'dark desires of man', visualized (shock horror) as a pretty blonde woman.
On their discussion page, a spurious shopping list of negatives are presented, then on the other side of the screen, they have a box saying how wonderful it is that children can learn from the internet. Both 'good' and 'bad' are disingenuously littered with enough false information and bogus arguments to sustain the deception just long enough to grab some email addresses, and shove a bucket-load of cookies into the machines of their victims. They then repeat that formula for 'ID theft', privacy (a massive problem for AOL users 1 2) and other similar political and contentious issues to ensure you will remain wound up enough to stay sufficently unaware of the monstrous scam.
In reality of course, the 'discussion' is a fraud and utterly worthless, a mere tool to get you to their site. And after all, no informed one way or the other view could possibily be debated or derived from the calculated false choices AOL have presented, a point which AOL well know. It's like saying cars are good/bad, or food is good/bad, although when AOL start asking questions like 'is freedom of speech good or bad', then we know the whole plot they have constructed is very bad indeed. I suspect the 'discuss' bit is just laying the groundwork for their 'solution' (yawn), which will form the next stage of the campaign, and it provides a TV-internet response statistic as well tricking some casualties into signing up for an AOL account.
Bizarrely, 21% of AOL's visitors to their 'discussion' site (according their poll there) think the internet is 'bad'. Perhaps that 21% use AOL, but in any event we should not forget that AOL's core market has always been people who know nothing about the internet to begin with. And no doubt, AOL will use this scam to profit from the remaining handful of clueless idiots out there who haven't yet recieved a CD or whatever they do these days, so that they may subscribe to AOL's proprietary spying, monitoring and filters that will save them from this debauched post-9/11 pandemonium of the internet.
The really sinister aspect of all this, and why I think this kind of commercial advertising, with this kind of message, that starts on TV shouldn't really be broadcast at all, is that AOL's campaign is inherently political in nature. Furthermore, it uses an extraordinarily arrogant and fraudulent vocabulary of concepts to create this distinctly artificial message, and that is all enormously worrying.
It trades off of the political war on terror mania to fear monger. Worse, AOL deliberately and knowingly mislead, frequently presenting good points as bad points and vice versa to create a big swirling mess of lies and nonsense so as to guarantee your reaction. The internet, of all things, is painted as the Orwellian 'Big Brother' threat to you (a double or triple layered lie), when nothing could be further from the truth. The internet is about the only place left where you have a huge measure of control over your privacy and power to easily exercise your inalienable right of freedom of speech. Everywhere else, that inalienable right has been subverted and distorted and suppressed while Tony Blair grandstands about 'terrorism', 'tolerance' or some other fraudulent token by which to disguise his hatred of liberty. So it is all the more disturbing that AOL's campaign, has more than a hint of endorsement toward the gross, abnormal and dehumanizing results of the purely political choices going on within the UK as a means of selling it's brand to it's core market of cretins.
Worst of all, this campaign, astonishingly, horrendously, mirrors exactly the same kind of corrupt fraudulent options put forward by the political establishment that has made the world such a grotesque mess and that we use the internet to help escape from, and re-educate ourselves against.
More generally, this kind of appalling scaremongering with the internet died a death about 5 years ago, rendering this drivel both preposterously regressive, and staggeringly redundant.
I wouldn't sign up and comment in anger on their 'discussions' (that is falling into the trap they have set, although it might be great fun to torment them), instead I would contact them here to complain:
Address: AOL (UK) Ltd, 80 Hammersmith Road, London W14 8UD
Switchboard: 020 7348 8000 | Web site: www.aol.co.uk | Fax: 020 7348 8002
AOL Advertising (probably for companies advertising on AOL but still)
Lou Chamberlain, who can direct you to the appropriate category specialist on:
Phone: 020 7348 8401 | Email: lchamberlainlc@aol.com | Fax: 020 7348 8002
If you are unlucky enough to be a customer, you can terminate your account now and send a written complaint about the advert as a reason:
c/o AOL Customer Services
PO BOX 2401
BRISTOL
BS1 9WX
You should also file a complaint about AOL's TV ad with the Advertising Standards Authority, your milage may vary as they have their own criteria,
Advertising Standards Authority
Mid City Place
71 High Holborn
London WC1V 6QT
Telephone 020 7492 2222
Textphone 020 7242 8159
Fax 020 7242 3696
Also try the Trading Standards Office
AOL discuss AOL advert AOL TV ad campaign
I guess the strategy of years of spamming everyone to death with their CDs, and being rightfully regarded as a joke by all serious internet users just wasn't enough for AOL. But what they are doing now is both extremely disingenuous and monumentally dangerous, in effect, trying to manufacture the premise for, invoke and then preside over, a hazardously political book-burning scenario.
Their pernicious and inflammatory cloth-headed campaign sets up a series of false debates intended to agitate you into participation on their website, thereby validating their pantomime and AOL's assumptions about your intelligence as a future customer. Meanwhile on their page, in their 'internet is bad' video, images of Big Brotheresque body scans are juxtaposed between footage of Osama Bin Laden and the Ku Klux Klan. (I swiftly filtered out this entire garbage with adblock before I even finished watching it).
Of course you have to provide an email address in order to participate in this enlightening 'discussion' they have kindly set up for you, and in doing so, no doubt, they will be contacting you after you leave your furious but inconsequential (to them) comment to send you another one of their crappy worthless CDs.
AOL, who have been gleefully exploiting their net newbie racket for well over a decade (and way longer than that), have now suddenly proposed that the net has just appeared and is indoctrinating you and your kids with porn, 'hate', and 'terror', whilst encouraging the 'dark desires of man', visualized (shock horror) as a pretty blonde woman.
On their discussion page, a spurious shopping list of negatives are presented, then on the other side of the screen, they have a box saying how wonderful it is that children can learn from the internet. Both 'good' and 'bad' are disingenuously littered with enough false information and bogus arguments to sustain the deception just long enough to grab some email addresses, and shove a bucket-load of cookies into the machines of their victims. They then repeat that formula for 'ID theft', privacy (a massive problem for AOL users 1 2) and other similar political and contentious issues to ensure you will remain wound up enough to stay sufficently unaware of the monstrous scam.
In reality of course, the 'discussion' is a fraud and utterly worthless, a mere tool to get you to their site. And after all, no informed one way or the other view could possibily be debated or derived from the calculated false choices AOL have presented, a point which AOL well know. It's like saying cars are good/bad, or food is good/bad, although when AOL start asking questions like 'is freedom of speech good or bad', then we know the whole plot they have constructed is very bad indeed. I suspect the 'discuss' bit is just laying the groundwork for their 'solution' (yawn), which will form the next stage of the campaign, and it provides a TV-internet response statistic as well tricking some casualties into signing up for an AOL account.
Bizarrely, 21% of AOL's visitors to their 'discussion' site (according their poll there) think the internet is 'bad'. Perhaps that 21% use AOL, but in any event we should not forget that AOL's core market has always been people who know nothing about the internet to begin with. And no doubt, AOL will use this scam to profit from the remaining handful of clueless idiots out there who haven't yet recieved a CD or whatever they do these days, so that they may subscribe to AOL's proprietary spying, monitoring and filters that will save them from this debauched post-9/11 pandemonium of the internet.
The really sinister aspect of all this, and why I think this kind of commercial advertising, with this kind of message, that starts on TV shouldn't really be broadcast at all, is that AOL's campaign is inherently political in nature. Furthermore, it uses an extraordinarily arrogant and fraudulent vocabulary of concepts to create this distinctly artificial message, and that is all enormously worrying.
It trades off of the political war on terror mania to fear monger. Worse, AOL deliberately and knowingly mislead, frequently presenting good points as bad points and vice versa to create a big swirling mess of lies and nonsense so as to guarantee your reaction. The internet, of all things, is painted as the Orwellian 'Big Brother' threat to you (a double or triple layered lie), when nothing could be further from the truth. The internet is about the only place left where you have a huge measure of control over your privacy and power to easily exercise your inalienable right of freedom of speech. Everywhere else, that inalienable right has been subverted and distorted and suppressed while Tony Blair grandstands about 'terrorism', 'tolerance' or some other fraudulent token by which to disguise his hatred of liberty. So it is all the more disturbing that AOL's campaign, has more than a hint of endorsement toward the gross, abnormal and dehumanizing results of the purely political choices going on within the UK as a means of selling it's brand to it's core market of cretins.
Worst of all, this campaign, astonishingly, horrendously, mirrors exactly the same kind of corrupt fraudulent options put forward by the political establishment that has made the world such a grotesque mess and that we use the internet to help escape from, and re-educate ourselves against.
More generally, this kind of appalling scaremongering with the internet died a death about 5 years ago, rendering this drivel both preposterously regressive, and staggeringly redundant.
I wouldn't sign up and comment in anger on their 'discussions' (that is falling into the trap they have set, although it might be great fun to torment them), instead I would contact them here to complain:
Address: AOL (UK) Ltd, 80 Hammersmith Road, London W14 8UD
Switchboard: 020 7348 8000 | Web site: www.aol.co.uk | Fax: 020 7348 8002
AOL Advertising (probably for companies advertising on AOL but still)
Lou Chamberlain, who can direct you to the appropriate category specialist on:
Phone: 020 7348 8401 | Email: lchamberlainlc@aol.com | Fax: 020 7348 8002
If you are unlucky enough to be a customer, you can terminate your account now and send a written complaint about the advert as a reason:
c/o AOL Customer Services
PO BOX 2401
BRISTOL
BS1 9WX
You should also file a complaint about AOL's TV ad with the Advertising Standards Authority, your milage may vary as they have their own criteria,
Advertising Standards Authority
Mid City Place
71 High Holborn
London WC1V 6QT
Telephone 020 7492 2222
Textphone 020 7242 8159
Fax 020 7242 3696
Also try the Trading Standards Office
AOL discuss AOL advert AOL TV ad campaign
posted by J.UL1R4 at 3:40 PM
4 Comments:
If you haven't seen V for Vendetta, do. The kind of brazen, painfully obvious propaganda seen in the movie is right here in the US now, with AOL leading the way.
Great post. Keep it up.
I was about to laugh when I read this:
"The accessibility of information is making us lazy..."
Huh?
I guess the invention of the TV spawned the invention of the couch potato. I'll give them that.
And the internet can kill hours and days if you're not careful.
But, is laziness a reason to discard a very convenient source of information? It's a terrible excuse to deny someone information because they might become "lazy."
So, I don't have to go to the newsstand, plunk down 50 cents, and read some corporate rag that I didn't want to read anyway.
Actually the internet has made me more in tune with the rest of the world, more aware of what's actually going on. I could never get that from being a channel flipping couch potato.
Marvelous, marvelous, MARVELOUS article. Thanks!
The most pointless article, ever.
God, talk about reading way too much into things!
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