Mozilla sending political ads via Firefox push notification

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/hx8737/why_did_i_just_receive_an_ad_for_mozillas_blog/

by paulcarroty • 6 years ago

99 49 6 years ago

Arnavion• 6 years ago

Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23946568

donatj• 6 years ago

Using their privileged position of being able to push any message they want to millions of people to promote a pro-censorship message. Classy.

gmb2k1• 6 years ago

I've lost all respect for Mozilla by now. They're still vital for the web ecosystem as a whole. But they turned into a polititcal party and I don't like.

rjeli• 6 years ago

...how does this kind of crap get approved? i use Firefox to avoid advertising and harassment from big companies.

iTOlduSO2• 6 years ago

Moz://a has joined the moral authority camp for a long time now, consequently "this kind of crap" are considered by Moz://a as a moral obligation hence perfectly normal.

[0] https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-digitized-cul...

jerome-jh2• 6 years ago

Considering how IT is increasingly used to make people's life miserable (part accidentally, part intentionally) I actually find this is a good thing they take a moral stance.

bachmeier• 6 years ago

The actual title is "Why did I just receive an ad for Mozilla's blog via push notification?"

Edit: The blog post in question is actually about Facebook.

sputr• 6 years ago

Had to click through a few links to get to the campaign page that explains what this is about.

Noticed the '... American values...' in the campaign page title and facepalmed. I got the ad and am European.

They did not think this through to catch that... I doubt they thought about consiquances of politicising the browser.

paulcarroty• 6 years ago

Here's the #StopHateForProfit campaign: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/?utm_source=leanplum-p...

luckylion• 6 years ago

When they remotely installed add-ons for an ad deal and it blew up in their face, they promised "we've changed". I don't think they have.

I did not receive the notification despite using Firefox on mobile, but a friend did. Maybe because he uses Facebook, and I don't. But that's unthinkable, a Browser claiming to be pro-privacy sniffing around in your web-history to target you for political ads. But then again, you'd also not expect a Browser to send you push notifications for their latest blog post.

rbecker• 6 years ago

Facebook is still a place where it’s too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence.

What an odd claim, coming from Mozilla - it's ultimately Firefox that displays all that hate and racism. If they think it should be censored, they can add a filter to the browser itself. Why leave censorship to Facebook, when clearly Mozilla is the more moral corporation, and knows better which content their users should be allowed to see?

mrkeen• 6 years ago

It's the platform-vs-publisher distinction.

Firefox the browser doesn't push you towards or away from any particular content, with maybe a few caveats (default search engine, etc.)

Facebook (employees & algorithms) decide what you will see on their site.

iTOlduSO2• 6 years ago

If they think it should be censored, they can add a filter to the browser itself.

Don't give them ideas

allendoerfer• 6 years ago

Mozilla, please get your shit together. We like you. We want you to succeed. I don‘t get how you don’t get us. I thought you are basically us.

I half-seriously suggest fireing everyone, who was not a developer at some point. If people who‘s background suggests they truly get your importance actually come up with stuff like this, I have no hope. Everyone grab your kids and run! We were doomed all along!

Macha2• 6 years ago

Yeah, Cliqz, Mr Robot, Pocket, Fenix having no extensions in the original roadmap, this, there's just a continuous trend of poor judgement from Mozilla. I wish there wasn't.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 6 years ago

Mozilla is using their Firefox browser to support their political censorship message.

What's next? Are we sure in the future that Firefox won't decide that certain sites espouse dangerous opinions and block these sites.

Mozilla's actions go against all their rhetoric about supporting the open web. They have no commitment to free speech nor any qualms about using Firefox to advance their political goals.

pornel• 6 years ago

It's not a random ad, it's Mozilla's own campaign: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/

Facebook is still a place where it’s too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence.

What a fucked-up politics we have this is not a neutral stance, but a polarizing "political view".

bauerd• 6 years ago

What you quote is not a stance, merely an observation. One can agree there's lots of socially undesirable speech (call it whatever you want) on Facebook, yet at the same time disagree Facebook ought to take their desired actions [0].

Besides, why my browser should send me a push notification for this particular campaign is beyond me. Even if I agree with the political contents this time, should I expect more push notifications of this kind in the future?

[0] https://www.stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations

darthrupert• 6 years ago

Is being anti-violence/hate a political stance now? Fuck.

alpaca1283• 6 years ago

For me the political part isn't the issue - the push notification itself is. I can't stand browser desktop notifications and similar useless distractions and have blocked every kind of ad and popup in Firefox. Now the browser itself circumventing this to push some stupid blog article to me that I never asked for is unacceptable to me. Would you be fine with your image viewer, video player or file browser to push messages and suggest blog articles to you without asking? Then why should a website viewer do it?

I just want web browsers to display content I requested, block ads and otherwise just don't try to do anything clever. Which worked pretty nicely in Firefox so far.

TheOperator2• 6 years ago

The campaign espouses it's "American Values", they specifically talk about US electoral interference, they specifically want to remove exemptions for politicians from censorship rules, and they also want to ban groups of anti-vaccers and "climate denialists" however those are defined from their platform.

You're badly representing what's actually going on here in an effort to sound pithy.

as1mov• 6 years ago

It's a bit ironic, considering a vanilla installation of Firefox has Facebook as one of the default "Top Sites"

alpaca1283• 6 years ago

Money does not stink after all

pixxel• 6 years ago

They tweeted out in May a list of video call apps that they had curated, when everyone was stuck indoors. Usual suspects at the top (Facebook), with trusted apps (Signal) near the bottom. It made me rethink my browser choice.

Markoff2• 6 years ago

their moral stance ends in their wallet

xacky• 6 years ago

Why hasn't Firefox been forked yet? Not a spin off like Pale Moon or Waterfox but an actual fork of the entire codebase. With only two real browser engines remaining the potential for an independent policitally neutral browser is high. I don't know why people haven't done it yet.

lxeiqr• 6 years ago

Why do you think that Pale Moon is not an "actual fork" though? They've forked off a rather old version of Firefox and kept updating and maintaining it for quite some time now, barely integrating new things from newer Firefox versions.

solarkraft• 6 years ago

People are forking. The project with currently the most traction seems to be LibreWolf: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/

However the development of such a program takes a massive amount of work (and money), which is something Mozilla still offers and any fork probably doesn't have.

It generally doesn't make sense to do so even with the resources, because you'd be duplicating a lot of work, so the "spin-off"s prefer to keep merging the original code, just excluding changes they don't like.

127• 6 years ago

Free means free. It doesn't mean free only to a certain groups of people.

slap• 6 years ago

Today I learned that Mozilla was pro-censorship, and using their install base to promote this message.

We're living in an intesting time.

dencodev3• 6 years ago

Asking platforms to not host and promote violent and racist content is hardly censorship.

lostmsu3• 6 years ago

What's wrong with violence? Do you propose to remove accounts of violent protests from Facebook now?

TheOperator2• 6 years ago

Plenty of comedic and satirical shows have been censored for racism. Plenty of violent forms of entertainment have been censored. This campaign is also calling for the censorship of anti-vaccination and climate denialist views.

I've done a bit of volunteer work as a censor (moderator) and I'm not opposed to censorship. A flippant/morally self-righteous attitude towards censorship is a red flag though.

andor• 6 years ago

I can see that people feel bothered by push messages they didn't ask for, but... "political ads"?

Anyone who feels offended by "stop hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence" needs to urgently figure out where their emotions come from.

s9w• 6 years ago

I preferred when Mozilla made browsers

ta17711771• 6 years ago

Secure ones, too.

kemonocode2• 6 years ago

I don't really care about their political stance or what they support (as many people claiming themselves to be slightly right of center seem to be so offended by) but using push notifications to shove that to my face is one step too far. They should just have stuck to their blog and social media.

Reminder this is the same company who have partnered with proprietary service companies to put on first-party functionality on their browsers (hi Pocket) and also used undocumented functionality to push ads on people before (the Black Mirror promo fiasco).

m-p-3• 6 years ago

Reminder this is the same company who have partnered with proprietary service companies to put on first-party functionality on their browsers (hi Pocket)

They didn't partner with Pocket, they own Pocket.

kemonocode2• 6 years ago

This came later [0] as originally Mozilla had partened with Pocket while they were still an independent entity as early as 2015 [1]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/27/14752590/mozilla-acquires...

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126

Markoff2• 6 years ago

brought to you by company not willing to implement even optional pull down to refresh for 5+ years

one of the reasons why U don't use their buggy slow browser on Android (use outdated Kiwi Browser, since it's only non shady browser with extensions support)

zanmat0• 6 years ago

This pushed me to give Edge a try and I was very pleasantly surprised so I'm going to be sticking with that.

thiht• 6 years ago

They've got to stop pulling this kind of crap again and again. They should not use their position to promote their political agenda.

Mozilla sending political ads via Firefox push notification

Related Stories