[TenebrisNoctis]

In my opinion, this erosion of freedoms is closely related to marketing departments that are now established practice in every IT company. Technological interest becomes an interest in profit, or at least these two become entwined, and in an environment driven by competition, the marketing strategies become very aggressive.

For example, review sites are frequently manipulated by fake posts, and new products that are introduced into the market find it inevitable to do the same because otherwise, they won't get the required visibility to back-up the investment.

And there's an elaborate online tracking mechanism established to follow the user online to obtain his/her purchase history, interests and desires, to push ads to the face, and this is done (although not always) without users consent, limiting online freedom.

I think there are lots of lessons to learn from Cambridge Analytica scandal, or from the practices of ClearView AI that are cooperating with law enforcement providing them facial recognition technologies.

[ouid]

There's a line from The Simpsons Movie that has stuck with me for a long time. Springfield has become critically polluted, and the US government is going to erase it from the map. To sell this idea to the masses, they enlist Tom Hanks to produce an advertisement. The line goes, "Hello, I'm Tom Hanks. The US Government has lost its credibility, so it's borrowing some of mine."

I see this as the fundamental problem. Advertising is, at its core, a transaction in which people with people with credibility and influence are paid to lie. It is a pollution of public discourse and intellect, and what we're seeing right now is the analog of runaway global warming.

[mediaman]

People blame ads all the time, but the blame is surface level: they dislike ads because they are unpleasant. But this is blaming a symptom of the real problem.

The real problem is tough to solve.

Ads themselves, intrinsically, are not bad. Ever tried to launch a better product? It turns out people rarely flock to it. Information about products seeps slowly through a population who would benefit from it. So, at its core, marketing helps increase the rate of information propagation.

But that's not all that marketing does, of course. Marketing has value as a signal, also: if a company is spending a lot of money on marketing, economists say it is 'posting a bond', meaning they put a lot of money into some asset (the brand) that will lose value if their product fails to deliver on its promises. That's not always true, of course, but brands with big budgets more often than not tend to more consistently deliver than those with no budget, so there's some signal there.

But still, humans are imperfect, so a portion of marketing is spent convincing people of things that aren't true, and it works some portion of the time, so it continues. And that's where marketing walks across the line separating its value as economic utility to its recipients into psychological manipulation.

Why do people put up with manipulation? Some say it's forced on them, that they have no choice.

But they do, broadly, have a choice. And their choice is, in aggregate, to be cheap. People are not willing to pay enough for content to allow that content to be delivered without the sort of marketing that goes beyond informational and bond-making and into intrusive and obtrusive.

So then content makers have a choice: do we not make content (or social platforms, or search engines, etc) at all, or do we make content and post ads?

That's not really a choice. The only option is to sell ads. And it is because consumers consistently choose to spend less money, and pay for their consumption not in immediate dollars but by offering up their attention to those who wish to change consumers' spending allocations. We can blame advertisers for this, but until consumers become willing to pony up - and they almost certainly will not - we will continue getting ads all the time, and continue blaming ads for a crappy web experience.

[brenden2]

I agree, I think ads are a scourge on society and the source of a great number of problems we have today. The problem is that the incentives are very strong for selling ads, but I think it can be corrected through regulation or taxation. If you decrease the profit margins, the amount of effort being expelled to manipulating people's attention will decrease drastically and big tech might go back to creating new technology instead of manipulating people.