I suspect Covid will provide Joe Biden a face-saving excuse to drop out of the race and allow the Democrats to choose another candidate for president. I want to say that candidate should be Kamala Harris, I really do, but that’s probably unrealistic given the party’s timidity. Still, American voters chose Barack Obama, not once but twice — and would probably elect Michelle Obama if she ran. As for the other strike against Harris, being a woman, don’t forget Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by nearly three million. Anything is possible.
Of course, there’s this. You know they’re going to milk that Triumph of the Will-inspired photo for everything it’s worth, from now to election day. And it’s worth a lot. Even if the acceptance speech that accompanied it was ten times worse than Biden’s performance at the debate, prompting this interesting series of posts from a well-known pollster who live-tweeted from the convention floor while Trump spoke:
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Resentment, revenge, racism. Where would Republicans be without the three Rs?
Well, moving on.
A while back a Facebook ad suddenly expanded to fill my iPad’s screen. There was no obvious way of making the ad go away to get back to what I was doing, but after a while it did. A day or two later, it happened again. Over time more and more ads popped up and refused to go away. What triggered these ads was touching them while scrolling with my finger. How diabolical is that, and how do you keep it from happening when you’re using a touchscreen?
I think what I witnessed was Facebook beta-testing a new feature to make ads “sticky.” Well, it’s happening on the regular now, so apparently they’ve implemented it. You won’t see an “X” or “close” button when a sticky ad takes over your screen, but you should be able to swipe down to make it go away. Then again, some full-screen ads are extra sticky and you have to swipe more than once. Maybe Meta charges advertisers an additional premium for that.
I don’t think Zucky’s figured out a way to make ads sticky on desktop computers, because with those you don’t scroll with your finger. But most of us get our hourly Facebook fix on mobile devices and if it’s happening to me it’s happening to you. And of course if it’s happening on Facebook, it’ll soon be happening on Instagram and Threads.
The New Yorker ran a prescient short story a couple of decades ago and I thought of it when sticky ads started appearing in my Facebook feed.
I don’t think it’s paywalled, so you should be able to click on the image to read the story. Highly recommend!