I got the ad pictured in frame 2 today and it made me sad, so I made this meme. So many levels of sad:
- Sponsored ad for a charity, plausible but seems fishy.
- The needy children are positioned as “earning” the food and education they will get by your donation by writing back to you. Just way too overtly transactional.
- The advertising tactic seems to prey on the lonely.
This reminds of the ads in the 80’s. Guy walking around some poor African country alwhile telling you for less then a dollar a day you could help a child in need. But the truth between the commercial and all the so called “packets” you get from the kids you “sponsor” would probably eat up most if not all that money. I doubt any needy kids were helped. Those ads ran for years and saw them every day multiple times a day.
But… I need healthcare too…
You need to find your own pen pal to write to and get health insurance
it’s AI, theres no reason to help children except for PR or legal purposes
The letters will be AI. The whole thing probably is.
I grew up in the 90s and 2000s and my older sister literally had a picture of a kid they “adopted” on their fridge. I think they sent them art and shit they made. I forget what charity it was. But definitely some Christian one.
Like, I don’t really blame the people that do it. They have good intentions and see zero relationship between US Imperialism and the poor kid they probably arent actually getting real updates on.
But it’s fucking wild this shit exists.
My parents did this, albeit before my time. I don’t know if there is a real problem if done genuinely. I remember a youth (well, more children’s) group I was in would sponsor a child in Africa somewhere and she’d send us letters. She sent us a Christmas card and it arrived in February, which is something I remember well. Hope she’s doing well.
“And here is where I hang my poverty porn. Ooh, Miguel just sent me a spicy drawing of a sun with a sad face and several bisected corpses littered across a hill. I don’t know what 'mih fumilya” means but this is going right on the fridge!"
Wasn’t that the premise of “About Schmidt”?
Traditionally a lot of these sponsorship charities only had a few dozen kids’ profiles that you’d choose from to “sponsor”, since the logistics of cataloguing and maintaining every individual would have been completely impractical. So little Miggy would have ten thousand different people all thinking they were sponsoring him personally, but in reality he was only ever a stock photo to begin with.
I can only guess how much more insidious this will have gotten in the AI age.
Assuming the charity is managing the money appropriately and donating it, is it insidious at all to use a stock photo?
Like it’s insidious that we live in a world that to donate people feel like they need recognition from the hungry child. It’s more insidious that there are hungry children at all of course
Can we really not agree that lying is bad? And now we have AI the lies are likely to get even more elaborate.
I’d lie if it meant a child was fed, unfortunately there’s very little in this world that is only good or bad. There’s a lot of grey
My first reaction was also the “and YOU get…”.
It’s a charity, right? I’m not expecting to get anything. I’m the one who is giving.
To counter this, there is actually a dignity thing. In quite a lot of cultures, including some western ones, there is shame attached to accepting charity. If the person feels like they worked for it, it gives them a sense of accomplishment and dignity. There was an old anecdote of someone who had a neighbour who was constantly needing financial/material help and was in need, and that person’s family was helping them. From time to time, they’d go and ask that neighbour for smaller things, such as some salt or stationery. They did this so their worse off neighbour felt more as equals than a lesser.
We’ve had these sorts of ads for awhile. Where you’re guilted for not giving money to sad dogs or whatever. This was subject of S01E08 of South Park about ‘Starvin Marvin’.
“Oh, so you don’t feel like writing today, huh? I guess you don’t feel like eating today as well!”
Yo is it another type of s&x chat, just with different content ?
