I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry.
The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings painfully true. The mechanical difference between getting someone to buy sneakers versus vote for a candidate is surprisingly small.
What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. We debate content moderation policies and algorithmic transparency, but rarely question the underlying attention marketplace that makes manipulation profitable in the first place.
The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic. We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm.
Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
Is this proposal radical? Absolutely. But sometimes the Overton window needs a sledgehammer.
P.S. If you are curious about the relationship between Sigmund Freud, propaganda, and the origins of the ad industry, check out the documentary “Century of the Self”.
I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable.
* Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.
In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it!
* Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
* Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
* Banning billboards or other public advertising? Fine. Not new. Done all over the place for commonsensical reasons.
* Any article that talks about "blurry, “out-of-focus fascism”—that sense of discomfort that you feel but can't quite point out" is itself blurry and out-of focus, not to say absurd and hyperbolic. Calling a mild sense of psychological discomfort "fascism" is just embarrassing.
> * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.
Some limits exist on advertising exist in most countries. Do they respect free speech?
> * Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
Absolutely zero thought is never given on policing boundaries on anything. That's not how the legal system operates. All laws are approximations at best and grey areas get decided by courts on a case-by-case basis.
> * Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year
This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech?
The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed?
What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
I hate advertising and propaganda. But the hard part IMO is drawing the line. Where's the line?
We don't need to go into absurd discussions in order to prevent 99% of the harm that comes from modern advertising.
The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising.
Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising.
We can later quibble about edge cases and how to handle someone putting up a sign for their business. Many countries have regulations about visual noise, so that should be considered as well.
But it's pretty easy to distinguish advertising that seeks to manipulate, and putting a stop to that. Hell, we could start by surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether. That alone should remove the most egregious cases of privacy abuse.
Just from the headline alone: oh please dear god yes.
The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages.
While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we cannot withdraw from even with ad and script blockers, because so much of society is built upon the advertising sector that it’s impossible to fully escape them. People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.
Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Let’s get rid of it.
Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content. Ads for guns. Ads for viagra knockoffs. Ads for “stock market tips” that use AI generated celebrity impersonations. Ads for “free money the government isn’t telling you about”.
It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over 10 minutes in.
On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
Sao Paulo, Brazil, made outdoor advertising illegal. That worked out quite well.
The US used to forbid prescription drug advertising. That seemed to work.
Ads for liquor, marijuana, and gambling are prohibited in many jurisdictions.
The FCC once limited the number of minutes of ads per hour on the public airwaves. That limit was below 10% of air time in the 1960s.
The SEC used to limit ads for financial products to dull "tombstone" ads, which appeared mostly in the Wall Street Journal.
A useful restriction might be to make advertising non tax deductible as a business expense. That encourages putting value into cost of goods sold rather than marketing.
Redmond, WA has a ban on billboards. Locals can see this demonstrated by driving 124th St. and crossing Willows Rd into Kirkland. First thing you’ll see are billboards.
Just got back from a trip to Florida. Billboards along every freeway, and 75% of them are personal injury lawyers. If you’re a resident of Redmond, it is an obnoxious contrast.
This feels very similar in my mind to blanket concepts like "let's ban lobbying". There are certainly specific modes or practices in lobbying that are damaging to society, but lobbying itself (specifically, informing lawmakers about your specific perspective and desires) is a valid and desirable function.
Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life that someone else is trying to provide and the only missing link is that you don't know about it.
In both cases, it seems totally fine to have strict guardrails about what kinds of practices we deem not okay (e.g. banning advertising to children, or banning physical ads larger than some size or in some locations), but the extreme take of the article felt like it intentionally left no room for nuance.
Why should we be open to nuance when we’re being actively manipulated? Cease manipulating me and I will hear them out on the nuances, provided the advertisers can articulate it.
Fantastic article, I particularly like the point about humanity being more or less ad-free for much of it existence. I was just thinking about absurdity of advertising yesterday. As a life-long football fan (not soccer ;)), I was always bothered by the slow creep-in of those silly, mindless pre- and post-game interviews they do with players and managers nowadays. In the two decades since this has been happening it never occurred to me why these were a thing, until yesterday. In a lead up to a minor game, of course there was an interview with one of the players. In front of one of those panels with repetitive ads for various businesses. As it happens to be the case every time for the last 20ish years. Of course! The interviewees are just providing the mindless content, while my mind absorbs the background ads! So obvious, but it never occurred to me even once. Ad industry is really a cancer on society.
Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil.
It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving smaller players a shot at visibility, and by making alternatives accessible to customers, without relying solely on monopolistic platforms or the randomness of word-of-mouth.
That said, today’s ad ecosystem is far from ideal - often opaque, invasive, and manipulative. Still, the underlying idea of advertising has real value. Fair advertising is a hard problem, and while reform is overdue, banning it outright would likely create even bigger ones.
In theory, I'm all for this. In practice, we have to take smaller steps towards this radical change and see how far we can actually get in real life.
In Norway, we have a total ban on advertising on certain products, like alcohol and tobacco. We also have strict laws regulating advertising towards children and political messaging on TV and radio.
There is only one problem; these laws where made before the digital age, so they have been sidelined. Political parties buy ads on Facebook and Insta like there is no tomorrow and children are constantly exposed to ads on social media. Only the ban on alcohol and tobacco is somewhat successful.
The right next move would be to ban peronalized ads (ie tracking of personal data). This is the one factor that has made the advertising industry (with Google and Meta at the top) go completely of the rails.
I had this idea before, but thinking about it, you very soon run into some pretty uncomfortable tradeoffs.
The internet would change fundamentally. The article lists social networks as things that would disappear, and good riddance, but we'd also lose (free) search engines.
Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a hotel, I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors. Those sites are pretty much 100% advertising, but how else am I gonna find a hotel on the other side of the planet, in a country I've never been before?
You also run into some tricky hairsplitting questions. Where do you draw the line on advertising? Are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? Or is that advertising? I don't want to outlaw online shopping entirely, it's extremely handy! What about search engine results from those webshops? Free search engines will disappear, but let's say I have a paid account and search for "buy dell laptop". Are the results advertising? How do you differentiate and define the cases legally?
I think it's a good idea, but it's gonna be quite tricky to implement well. And executing this idea poorly is potentially quite bad.
Getting it implemented at all is going to be hard: even well executed, this idea is going to have a huge impact on the economy, and people are not going to like that. This idea would be good for democracy, but ironically democracy is not good for this idea.
Already solved elsewhere in the thread: Ban unsolicited advertising. Product recommendations in places where the consumer is explicitly visiting to get product recommendations are not unsolicited.
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear
No they wouldn't.. the business model would change. Facebook sells ads to businesses and entertainment to consumers. People still want to be entertained.
What about the positive effects from advertising? Many products which I never knew existed have gone on to improve my life.
To kill addictive digital content (especially those targeted at young people), just go after them directly. I agree the world will be a better place once we don't spend 10-16 years old online. But the advertising argument doesn't make any sense to me.
Most users are not happy with addictive apps. The psychology of something you pay for is fundamentally different to something that's free. If your choices were paying for TikTok, or paying for actually good entertainment, I think a lot of people would do the latter.
Advertising was originally illegal on the internet. It was for non-profit activities only (university and industrial research and educational activities). When the world wide web first deployed in 1989, web advertising was illegal. The rules changed some time in the early 1990's.
I do remember a major scandal that occurred in the 1980's when somebody posted an advertisement to usenet. At the time, there was a lot of online discussion about why this was prohibited. I looked this up, and found that the internet backbone (the NSFNET) was funded by the NSF, who enforced an acceptable-use policy, prohibiting Backbone use for purposes “not in support of research and education.” [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/253671.253741]
So yes, it's possible, because we already did it once.
It subsidizes basically all modern entertainment, from the filmmaking and sports industries (through TV Shows and sports broadcasts, respectively), to musicians and amateur filmmakers (through Spotify and Youtube).
The costs of advertising are ultimately passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices for products and services, not unlike a VAT or sales tax. Because rich people spend more money than the poor (citation needed), they end up paying a lot more of this "tax" while getting the same amount of entertainment for it.
Targeted advertising only exacerbated these dynamics. Because high-spenders are very desirable customers to have, companies can now demand more money for the ability to target them, which turns advertising from a linear to a progressive tax.
Advertising turned the internet into a sort of public commons, with no government intervention and the inevitable inefficiencies and inflexibilities that come with those. It gave us free, high-quality video and voice calls to anywhere across the world, free unlimited texting, including picture messaging and group conversations, free video hosting for everybody, regardless of scale, free music (through Youtube, Spotify and the radio), with at least some compensation to artists, free movies and TV shows (on free-to-air TV as well as through services like Pluto), excellent free educational content (e.g. 3b1b, university lecturers hosted on Youtube at no charge), as well as cheaper entertainment overall through ad-supported tiers.
I think framing things this way is important when discussing advertising regulation. Maybe we want more cheap groceries, don't care about cheaper luxury cars and don't mind less free entertainment, so maybe we should ban grocery ads and encourage more Mercedes ads. Maybe we're fine with less free entertainment if it gets us fewer alcoholics, so we ban ads for alcohol. Those are tradeoffs worth thinking about, perhaps tradeoffs worth making, but they are tradeoffs, and it is important to be conscious of that.
Even if advertisers make more money from the rich (citation needed), the poor are still disproportionately negatively effected. I would argue that it's less ethical to persuade someone with $100 to their name to spend $10 on something they don't need, than to persuade someone with $1,000,000 to spend $500 on something they don't need.
To bolster this argument, look at the things that are most advertised to the poor: alcohol, gambling, fast food, and predatory loans (including predatory auto financing).
The wealthy, meanwhile, are more likely to be targeted with ads for lifestyle goods: health foods, travel, gym memberships.
I find it ironic that there's a big "Follow @index@simone.org via your Fediverse account (like...)" over this article that I can't seem to close and covers up part of the article.
I use ublock origin on Firefox and next dns on my router with a block list. I pay for ad free YouTube. My kids had a lesson in how annoying commercials are during a trip where they tried to watch a BBC animal documentary and had to see the same commercial five times in a row because I guess not enough advertisers signed up with the provider. I don't like billboards. I'm pretty sympathetic to getting rid of advertising and do so as much as possible in my own life.
That said this article glosses over the first amendment which absolutely needs to be considered because (at least in the United States) that is the big barrier to any sort of restriction.
Also the idea of what constitutes an ad. Billboards? What about large signs showing where a store is? Are people with big social media accounts allowed to tell us about their favorite products? Only if they don't get money? What if they get free products? We'll have financial audits I assume to make sure they aren't being sneaky. No more sponsored videos? What about listing the patreons that made the video possible?
How will this be sold to the people that need ads for their small business? We'll need a majority support to pass a constitutional amendment.
The thing that really irks me is celebrity endorsements.
Tell me, do you think Roger Federer really appreciates that watch he's selling you? Does he really use that coffee machine that he sells, and thinks it's the best one?
We know what his motivation is, he is not your friend who bought a watch and a coffee machine, used them, and recommended them to you. He gets paid by the producers of the stuff he endorses.
Plainly, advertisers have discovered a loophole in the human psyche, and are exploiting it. We evolved to take in recommendations from people we know, and billboards/TV/etc are close enough to the real thing to trigger _something_ in us that doesn't just work when it's a non-celebrity whose face we don't know. The effect is big enough that celebrities get paid a gigantic amount of money to pretend they are someone you trust and recommend some product they never even thought about until they got given the deal.
I think we should tax that kind of thing. I'm not restricting his free speech. Roger is free to stand in front of the opera in Zürich and tell random strangers that they should buy the coffee machine. But if you put it in mass media, there should be a gigantic tax.
People will hate me for saying this, but when people want to ban advertising they fail to realize how much utility they actually get from advertising when it is done in a straightforward, ethical way. At the core, advertising and advertisements are a way to inform potential customers of a product or service that they might like. A few points for consideration:
1. You probably only know about half the things you like, enjoy, and use because of advertising. Did you see a trailer for a movie on YouTube you wanted to watch? That is an ad for a movie. Did you get a demo disc for a new band at a party or club in the 90s? That is an ad. Did you see the concert lineup poster? Ad. No one complains when advertising is done well and provides utility.
2. Ads subsidize things you enjoy. Browsers, search engines, television, your tv, most websites, are all subsidized through advertising. You can say would prefer to just pay full price for it and avoid the ads, but most people clearly would not like to when given the option.
3. What even is an ad? What is the line? Are store signs an ad? Are movie trailers? Defining what an ad is and isn’t is messy and a bit silly.
4. The alternative may be worse. What happens when traditional ads stop working? Businesses still need to get their message out, so what do they do? They hire YouTubers to play talk positively about their product, they wine and dine journalists and publications for favorable coverage, which becomes easy because without ads they are hurting for revenue. If ads were banned this would get worse.
It is nice to opine about a utopia without ads, and believe me, I often do, but the reality is advertising has been around for thousands of years and integral to how business and even society works.
If you are a new company starting out (suppose aluminum siding), you have to market your product or else nobody will know about it. I'm not sure what all parts of marketing are counted as advertising here, but generally in marketing you pay to get word out about your product. Wihtout that, starting a business might be tough. And then, as a consumer, there are lots of free products I have gotten my entire life by virtue of the fact that one of those companies offered to pay for it for me. If you turn that off I'm not sure how that all would work. I don't think the OP goes into too much detail.
Better would be to make targeted advertising unprofitable. This could be done by requiring data retention to be accounted for as a liability on the balance sheet.
E.g. If a business want to run an ad in the newspaper, go for it. But if they want to follow me around on the internet and collect information on everything that I do, then they should be required to record what they collect. Congress could then vote to make laws introducing taxes on that quantity.
Once this stuff is measured then appropriate counter measures could be taken to discourage socially damaging enterprises.
The issue is that if you ban advertising, we still get advertising, but it'll be done in a way that hides that it is an advertisement. Aka, the internet will be full of bot posts that are thinly veiled ads posing as legitimate inquiry or discussion. That's a worse off scenario. Better the enemy you know.
Some countries (Poland?) has experimented with banning advertising in public spaces. Think bill boards. This has lead to very clean and good looking cities. I don’t think the it’s unreasonable to ban ads in other places too.
So some of the most critical public goods of our age, which are currently mostly ad-funded, like web search, video hosting, email hosting, smartphone navigation, etc. would become publicly funded? Great, I'd like to live in that world too. But this article says nothing about how to get there (actually it considers the demise of Google et al to be an argument in favor without even considering the fact that in the absence of advertising, Google's services would need to be either restricted to those who could afford them or taken over by the government).
Advertising certainly has plenty of negative externalities, but the positive externalities of the free ad-funded services I mentioned are absolutely mind-boggling. Try to imagine living without them (if you couldn't afford to pay for them yourself).
Thought about that years back, and went to the conclusion that you can't kill advertising and political propaganda without strict rules that every big business and their owned politicians would fiercely fight against.
Also, advertising is the way they keep barely alive an economic system almost entirely based on overproduction of unnecessary goods built to not be durable; take out advertising and you'll see millions of people bankrupt; not thousands: millions. Advertising doesn't scale anymore: from a handy tool to discreetly let people two blocks away that a new barber shop just opened, has transitioned to a weapon businesses use to fit their product between a thousand others, grabbing more and more space from every free second or square millimeter, in the hope they capture the attention of someone who doesn't give a damn about them; and it can only get worse. I'm all for killing it, but be warned that if you take it out, you take out the entire business universe built around it that depends on it to be kept afloat. It'd probably need a few decades, not even years, to become reality if someone decided to start the process in a harmless way. But would first need a very different political environment to be accepted: more power to the state, less to corporations, and probably that would conflict with ideas that some propaganda, that is, advertising, stuck in the mind of so many people several decades ago, and those are quite hard to undo.
Maybe a good initial step would be to tighten up false advertising laws:
Make it illegal to make statements that are not objectively true. E.g. you can't say that your product is "the best", you can only say specifically how it is better.
Put restrictions on advertising an idealized version of a product and then selling a lesser version. E.g. the difference between what fast food ads show versus what you get. I'm sure it would be difficult to completely fix that since it's so subjective, but we could probably get incremental improvements.
I suspect this proposal wouldn’t be met well. Ignore the pachyderm in the shared living space (all the lovely money people make from advertising), but defining “what’s an ad” gets sticky.
For example, highly relevant PSAs and warnings could be considered “ads.” They can be every bit as obnoxious as “penis pill” ads, but they convey information that may be of life and death importance.
The placards outside professional offices are ads; possibly the oldest form of advertising.
In-store signage are ads, and can cost sellers a lot of money.
You could argue that “shelf-stackers,” and “endcap displays” employed by supermarkets, are a form of advertising.
Sales people rely on personal relationships, and get quite skilled at making every conversation they have, into a sales pitch (which can get annoying).
Promotion is a very complex system, and often goes far beyond simple signage. For many businesses, it’s a matter of life and death.
People that run businesses probably can’t live without them, and are willing to pay a pretty penny for ads.
One thing that might be relevant, are “ad books,” like the old-fashioned Yellow Pages, “pennysaver” papers, or the “brand books,” used by designers. These are ads, but gathered into a place where they are expected, and actively sought out.
In the last century, we often called variants of these, “catalogs.”
Silly idea. Some advertising is bad. Some is really bad. Other advertising is useful. I wouldn't know about half the gigs or exhibitions I go to and enjoy if it weren't for the advertisements throughout the city. There are many small local businesses I wouldn't know about (to my detriment) if it weren't for advertising. The internet as we know it never would have been built if it weren't for advertising.
But there is a certain kind of advertising that is detrimental. My first thought is Amazon 'sponsored' products. Allowing companies to pay money to put inferior products at the top of search results is bad for society. Same goes for Google sponsored search results. Sponsored content in general is terrible. People that have gained your trust selling you things and not actually telling you they are being paid to do so. There are many many digital ads that would not be allowed IRL because they would be stopped for false advertising by regulators.
Like most things in life these days, the problem is not the thing itself. The problem is the Wild West that is the internet where there is minimal regulation allowing people to lie, cheat and get away with it.
What if we built a strong culture around actively avoiding advertising? What if we educated the general public about adverse effects of time after time giving up your attention, without getting anything in return besides a short lived dophamine kick? What if we showed how it's only in those moments of paying attention a person has a chance to exercise agency over their own life, and spending that scarce resource on doomscrolling is a catastrophic-group-mind-suicide, sadistically prolonged over the lifetime of an entire generation? That the illusion of community in the comments is just that, an illusion that dispels the moment the user clicks the dreaded "logout" button spitting them back into a gray heroine-withdrawal-like reality, isolated from their peers, all means of human connection monopolized by the attention sharecropping farms? That every moment a jingle on the radio captures your mind it's distracting you from something necessarily more important? That we are all in effect trapped in that externally-perpetuated procrastination loop, with all the neon-lit arrows pointing us further and further away from what truly matters -- our very lives?
Stay away from the algorithmic feeds, instead get to know your authors and choose them explicitly. Stay away from the personalized ads, pay for content you care about, block what can be blocked, avoid the rest. Learn active banner blindness: catch your attention drifting and look away. Uninstall reels, tiktok, youtube, sanitize your life from short term attention grabbers. Turn off that TV. Mute your car radio. Practice focus: take a book and set a timer. Lock yourself up in a room with a hobby project. Meditate. Set up a ritual with a friend or family, as long as you still got any. Make smalltalk to strangers. Get to know your neighbors. Plan that getaway. Choose your life!
Let's start with banning the sharing/selling of customer data, tracking data, or anything else that can be aggregated to form some idea of a targetable resource.
That would shed some initial societal parasites. See what's left, and then go after the next biggest / grossest topic in the space.
I could get behind that particular brandishing of chainsaw.
It's a solid idea, and could even fall under 'anti-spam laws' with some additional clauses. There should be a daily or monthly limit on the max number of people that a person or entity can contact or send unsolicited content to... Maybe like 100 people per day on average. That's more than enough for anyone to make a living as a sales person.
Big tech has been mass-spamming us with unsolicited content for decades and driving monopolization, centralizing opportunities towards those who can talk the talk and away from those who can walk the walk. So we've been getting lower value for our money and also losing jobs/opportunities which has made it harder to earn money.
It's crazy that big tech is allowed to spam hundreds of millions of people with unsolicited content but if any individual did it on the same scale, they'd be in jail.
Define advertising. Studies suggest that as much as 80% of news articles may have been placed by PR firms rather than generated through independent reporting. This forum is a classic case where blog posts are masquerading as authentic content, when in reality, they're simply another form of advertising.
Anecdotally, my QoL has gotten much better once I made a conscious attempt to avoid being fed advertisements. I’ve stopped using social media and pay for YouTube premium. It’s night and day difference in terms of my purchase patterns and overall level of happiness with the things I currently have.
I have mixed feelings about advertising. Small businesses definitely need advertising to at least compete with the bigger guys, but online platforms such as Google and Facebook are simply landlords in the electronics age. Microsoft too, with its "monopoly" of desktop OS and how it tries to force ads down our throats.
I feel it's impossible to get rid of those Ads platforms such as Google or Microsoft. Businesses need them. If you ask me, I'd say, government should levy a heavy tax on Ads , so basically like gas stations, they are only allowed say 10% of profit margin, and they must cap their ads somehow. Ads is basically a public service, and every public service, if not run by the State, should only allow a very small margin of profit, like public transit and such.
I'm so happy to read this, I've been thinking about this question for a while now, and I think it would help a lot:
Big companies where revenues are based on marketing would collapse, the market fragments (which is good), smaller companies are created instead, better diversity of local products and services. Better wealth distribution. More money for the government, hopefully better public services.
With less flashy products and services, people have a better purchasing power, even considering they'll have to pay for services they use, like reviews.
Review companies would need strict controls to be put in place against corruption.
It would probably also change a lot of nonsensical landscapes (ex: sports)
If ads just vanished, that would be great, but making it illegal ought to do more harm than good. For one, a lot of ad money would be routed to shills, which are far more pernicious and have already infested otherwise great platforms like Reddit. Everything would turn to crap and no adblocker would help you. An ad ban would make every influencer profile instantly worthless, unless they decide to shill, which they're probably already doing anyway.
Also big tech would be incentivized to sell even more user data, as their business would still mostly exist, either via subscriptions, or through the now even more profitable user data market with more expensive targeted shilling.
> It's such a wild idea that I've never heard it in the public discourse.
IIRC there is a Dilbert comic strip about that.
> Clickbait [...] would become worthless overnight
Advertisement is not the only incentive. E.g., the Veritasium YouTube channel's host explicitly switched to clickbait, explaining it by his intent to reach a wider audience. Another example is clickbait submission titles on HN, not all of which are for the sake of advertisement (unless you count HN submissions in general as advertisements themselves, of course).
> When I say advertising, I also mean propaganda. Propaganda is advertising for the state
Not necessarily for the state, the usual definition includes furthering of ideas in general. In more oppressive regimes, propaganda of certain ideas is actually banned, as it used to be in even more places ("heresy" and suchlike). Combined with selective enforcement, it is as good as banning all propaganda. It may be a particularly bad example of such a ban, but still an illustration of the dangers around it.
I think a better path towards the world without (or almost without) commercial advertising is not via coercion, but as kaponkotrok mentioned in another comment, via education and public discussion (which may also be called "propaganda"), shifting social norms to make such advertisement less acceptable. People can make advertisements unprofitable if they will choose to: not just by ignoring them (including setting ad blockers), but also by intentionally preferring products not connected to unpleasant and shady tactics, including those beyond advertisement: slave labor and other human rights violations, unsustainable energy sources, global warming, animal cruelty, monopolies, proprietary or bloated software and hardware are some of the common examples. Social norms and such enforcement seem to be less brittle than laws are, and harder to turn into an oppression mechanism.
Although, since I brought up monopolies and other issues, perhaps state agencies may also usefully assist with restriction of advertisement, as they do with those. Social norms and laws are not mutually exclusive, after all.
What do [search engines, social networks, newspapers] look like? I assume they'd all be paid and you'd get some free tastes and then decide which you'd pay for in the long term (à la kagi).
By removing the third party payer, the service provider has no incentive to do anything for them, whether aligned or not with the user. That is the big plus.
What about all the money that companies use to promote their products and services through advertisements and marketing? Some portion of that would probably go to making their products better. The rest... from their standpoint, how do they even get a potential customer to know they exist? That's tough.
You can already block 99% of ads on devices you own. I haven't seen an internet ad in ages. I forget that websites have them.
That said, I don't think it's appropriate to outlaw all advertising. It should still be allowed in places where you'd be open to it anyway: in stores and other places where you spend money anyway, and in specialized publications that exist for people who intentionally want to be advertised to.
However, for when you're buying something, upselling (any questions by the seller that may result in you buying something you didn't intend to buy originally) should be illegal. It feels very insulting to me.
I’m not convinced by the argument that it shouldn’t be considered free speech. What exactly we mean by a private place… I dunno, but I definitely feel like I’m “going to” content, even if it is just digitally, when I’m on a phone. So, it doesn’t feel like they are invading my privacy. It is an annoying person in public, usually protected unless they are violent.
In terms of “let’s try this surprising new change in the laws,” I’d rather see it become illegal to collect a lot of information about people. Maybe we can consider what Facebook/Google and data brokers do something like stalking.
The biggest TV event of the year in the US is the Super Bowl, and a big part of the event that people look forward to is advertising. Ad spots during the Super Bowl are famously expensive (like millions of dollars for a 30 second ad), and advertisers try really hard to make funny or memorable ads. There are lots people who don’t care about football and watch just to see the ads.
The best ads and brands are an iconic part of our culture - something cherished and celebrated by many. I think this is worth keeping in mind at least when talking about banning advertisements.
Google was initially incredibly useful because it ranked pages created by people who were largely not motivated by advertising using an algorithm that didn't allow you to pay for placement. Now both the content and the algorithm have been heavily co-opted and so people are turning to 'AI' half technological wonder and half merely just returning to unbiased relevance based responses to user queries. At least until that too starts to replace relevance with paid advertising in its responses and the cycle will start anew.
It is an interesting thought. What could be new business models for sites that currently rely on third party advertising? It seems big publishers are increasingly moving to first party advertising. But that seems difficult for small publishers.
While advertising messages may not be themselves particularly important for free speech and can be even detrimental to it, e.g., propaganda, sites themselves disseminate speech and are often third-party ad-financed. What could be a good business model for them (other than direct payments)?
Unfortunately, the next question becomes “is consumer reports considered an ad” etc.
It becomes a question of what truly is an ad?
That said I appreciate this sort of thought; it would even be nice for it to be implemented, but whether it could be enforced is another question. At that point it then becomes a question of who you allow to advertise.
For a long time, hedge funds were not allowed to
solicit investments publicly under rule 502c of reg D.
I could see grounds to restrict things further; I’m sick of restless leg syndrome drug treatment ads…
I really dislike the impulse to ban things we don't like.
Of course, a ban on advertising will never happen, because it's very useful to some people. I'm more concerned with the general pattern of thinking that goes:
1. I greatly dislike thing and think thing is bad.
2. Thing should therefore be illegal.
We should be less eager to use the power of law to mold the world to our preferences. It should be a solemn undertaking to use the law! It's an instrument of coercive power and should really be held in reserve as much as possible. Otherwise, we're all just petty tyrants sniping one another for minor transgressions.
There are many things that are very bad that nonetheless must be legal in a free society! I realize this is a uniquely American right, but I nonetheless believe "hate speech" must remain legal. It is bad, yes. I do not like it. I really wish it didn't happen. However, it is markedly less bad than entrusting some byzantine bureaucracy or benevolent dictator to adjudicate the meaning of hate speech. I greatly prefer a world with hate speech to one in which we apply legal authority to eliminate hate speech.
Some years ago, at the height of the Augmented Reality bubble, I had a hackathon idea about smart sunglasses that would replace any detected poster and billboard with information of your choosing - your favorite art, personal photos, notifications about upcoming alarms.
I am no longer into hackathons, but I would pay good money for such a product. Bonus points if it is styled like Nada's glasses from They Live.
```Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers```
I want to believe that the author is hopelessly naive, and not a more nefarious actor. These traditional media gatekeepers are not by any means friendly to democracy; they're literal tools of the state, and actively work against the interests of the populace. I say this without a hint of irony: I trust social media more.
As someone who's worked in marketing for 15 years - across big agencies in New York and running growth for startups - there's an uncomfortable truth to this piece. The industry has quietly become something darker than when I joined.
Modern advertising doesn't just sell products, it sells our own attention back to us at a premium. What started as "connecting products to people who need them" has warped into engineering digital environments that hack our baseline neurological responses.
The most disturbing part is that most people inside the machine know it. I've sat in rooms where we've explicitly designed systems to maximize "time on site" by exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities. The language we use internally is more clinical than predatory, which makes it easy to avoid moral questions.
What's wild is how this piece frames advertising as a relatively recent phenomenon. It's right - for 99% of human history, we made purchasing decisions based on community knowledge and direct information, not carefully engineered psychological triggers that follow us around.
Sure, banning all advertising sounds extreme, but it's worth asking: what would we actually lose? Product information would still exist. Reviews would still exist. Word-of-mouth would still exist. We'd just lose the sophisticated machinery designed to bypass our rational decision-making.
The "free speech" counter-argument has always struck me as disingenuous. Nobody believes they have a constitutional right to interrupt your dinner with a telemarketing call.
It's interesting, I have been saying a much less intelligible version of this from observing my children.
They have been exposed to services without advertising, and as soon as they see an ad... "Another commercial!!!".
A part of me hopes their entire generation can develop a disdain for advertising based on the negatives they can see in their parents.
The problem is that, as the article mentions, there are "good" forms of advertising that are actually meant to inform people. Unfortunately the overwhelming majority, and even more so in "high-end" advertising, is not that. So, the question is how can we distinguish the good from the bad?
One of the key distinguishing factors is that "bad" advertising is intentionally deceptive. The explicit objective is how to overstate colloquially while technically saying something that is not untrue if interpreted by a genie or monkey's paw. Advertisers run war rooms and focus groups to make sure that the message they are promoting is verifiably and scientifically misinterpreted by the target audience while having legal review so that if it comes to court they can say: "Technically, your honor..." we meant something different than what we explicitly and intentionally aimed for.
The standard is backwards. The more money you spend on advertising, the more intentionally truthful it should be. You should run focus groups to verify that the message is not misinterpreted to your benefit the larger the advertising campaign. When you go to court and say: "Technically, your honor..." you should immediately lose (after reaching certain scales of advertising where you can be expected to have the resources to review your statements). Misinterpretation should be a honest surprise occurring despite your best efforts, not because of them and the litmus test should be if your efforts were reasonable at your scale to avoid such defective speech.
The standard is trivially assessable in court: Present the message to the target audience and ask them their interpretation. Compare it to the claims of deception. If the lawyer says: "Technically, your honor..." they lose. However, they can present evidence that they made reasonable efforts to avoid misinterpretation and that the specific form of the misinterpretation is unlikely or unexpected.
The standard is easily achieved by businesses. Make intentionally truthful claims and have your advertising teams check and test for misinterpretation. Err on the side of caution and do not overstate your claims to your benefit and the potential detriment of your customers. If you think "technically speaking", you are on the wrong track. If you would not tell that candidly to your relatives or friends, you should probably stop.
It is not like people do not know they are being deceptive, they just need to be held to it.
Find a major metropolitan newspaper from 1990. Print would be best, so that you can feel the heft. Now compare it to the same newspaper (if it exists) today. Print advertising did not become illegal, just uneconomical. Now consider what happens to the entities that now run on advertising. Do they survive?
Economist here. My biggest issue is with the “news” industry.
Companies provide what the customer wants. And, as the adage goes, if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Advertisement-funded “news” isn’t meant to enrich the reader/viewer — it is meant to attract the reader/viewer.
I think that perverted incentive has always existed with it, but the internet ad technology has really killed the information content. And now we’re have society-scale problems with misinformed citizens.
I don’t think industry will solve the problem. If a company allowed users to opt out and pay, their richest customers would do that and those were the ones most valuable to advertise to. So, offering an opt-out probably loses them money (and increases costs).
I think the news industry should be advertising free. I’d have to think on if it should also have govt funding, but that often gets co-opted.
If you ban all forms of advertising, society will grind to a halt, even before considering free speech. How can a business be successful if no one knows that it exists? Advertising connects people who need something to people who provide it. It absolutely essential to society and in a sense, it predates humans, if we consider mating as a form of advertising, like peacocks using their tails as some kind of a biological billboard.
I understand what the author means, he is annoyed by ad breaks, banners, and tracking, we all are, and he would like to see less of them, we all do, except whoever makes money over these banners that is.
The author suggests banning paid-for advertisement. But how far will it go? For example, you want to print flyers to promote your business. Is it illegal for the print shop to print your flyers, as they are making money on advertising. Classified ads will become illegal too, forget about craigslist and the likes.
It kinds of remind me of some "abolitionist" laws on prostitution that some countries have. Prostitution is legal, based on the idea that people own their bodies and people have the right to have sex, but everything surrounding prostitution is not, including advertising and pimping. The definition for pimping can go far, for example renting a room to a prostitute can be considered pimping. The idea is essentially to make prostitution illegal without writing it explicitly. A blanket ban on advertising will do that, but for all businesses.
As always, for every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple and wrong.
I think he missed one of the use cases for advertising: providing “free” services to people in the “third world”. I come from west Africa, majority of people can’t afford to pay for Facebook, YouTube, whatsapp etc even though these are their main means of communications. Even if they could afford it (“just a few cents is nothing” to us on here - to these people that’s how much they make in a day), they don’t use traditional banking services and certainly not access to credit and debit cards to make payments. I hate ads too, for all the reasons mentioned in the article. But I don’t see a feasible way to make these services available for the 1 billion plus people I’m describing. Open to ideas.
In France, I had watched a video on the subject more than 10 years ago, and since then I have been in favor of banning all forms of advertising, including and especially IRL in the streets. I've been using an adblocker on each of my devices ever since I saw that video, and I no longer see any ads (I use ReVanced etc. for X, YouTube, etc.), except unfortunately in real life since there are still ads in the streets, but at least from an activist standpoint, the online advertising industry should take a hit.
If any French speakers are interested, I believe it was this YouTube channel (which is very interesting anyway for discussions about fascism, advertising, manipulation, etc.): https://youtube.com/@hacking-social
I don't have to imagine it at least on the internet - I've been blocking all ads on all my devices very successfully since 1999. In fact now I can't stand having to look at or use anyone else's computer or smartphone (usually when they ask for free tech support).
IMO advertising itself is ok, if not targeted by profiling user. I'm reading about bikes and I'm offered a bike or helmet? Fine by me.
Problem starts, when I'm scrolling $socialWebsite and I see ton of biking ads, because some Orwellian ad network is tracking me through time & space.
Then content starts to serve as means to push ads into my eyes whenever I dare to open them. If content is crap - doesn't matter - if I switch to other source ad will follow.
What's worse - many people were brainwashed into believing that's normal. I remember guy from Chrome team, who published draft for web attestation. He was convinced he's doing good thing because brands have "right" to be sure they're getting real eyeballs and he was just making this process "better" for the users.
One of the things that bothers me most about advertising is that we sell attention to the highest bidder. It happened before online ads too but online ad networks 'perfected' the bidding process. And I say this as someone who's made much of my wealth indirectly off of such ad networks.
It means the expensive product/service gets your attention, coz it can afford a higher bid, instead of the one that's better for you. It also sets a high floor on prices.
To some extent the bidding process was needed when there was inherent scarcity of inventory to place information (e.g. billboards or the 1 local radio station), but there's no scarcity online. Why can't we just have a web where product/service info is listed, and people can seek that info through some search engine?
For me personally advertising doesn't work. I've never bought or done anything because of an advert. If all ads stopped tomorrow nothing would change for me. Advertising clearly works out it wouldn't be such a big industry, I just don't get it though.
Here's another thought: I just wish more businesses had some class. Maybe your logo and product doesn't need to be smeared across every inch of physical and digital real estate. I realize the article is focused on digital advertising, but for example, am I really inclined to buy life insurance from the guy whose face is on the back of the shopping cart? NIL has ruined college sports and at its heart it's about being able to slap a logo on the back of a college kid. Prudent to say, gee, maybe there are more tasteful ways to get the message out to the world about our produce or service would be a nice thing.
You can ban specific forms of advertising. But the general form is too vague, too easy to hide.
Movies set in our world, for example, should be allowed to show real cars, real phones, etc. But that is nigh impossible to prevent from becoming a fight for getting your product placed. And lots of similar places.
It might be possible to outlaw ads targeted more narrowly than a bit of content (i.e. advertisers have to choose, ahead of publication, what content to put their ads next to.)
Combining this with banning some of the more direct advertising might work. Though perhaps a world where advertising is purely done through product placement is also horribly distopian.
As ads are getting crammed into more and more aspects of our lives both online and offline, what I find particularly creepy is there's been a push by advertisers and tech companies to normalize these practices to upcoming generations. It seems like we're getting pushed towards the status quo of Futurama where we'll have ads broadcast into our dreams... As is the case with idiocracy, that wasn't an instruction manaul. I can only hope we can push the Overton window back to a place where limitatons on advertising can at least be considered.
I've been saying this for years. It would be great to make advertising illegal.
Advertising is just psychological manipulation. Any argument that there's "good" advertising that respects the target and is merely informative... well, maybe there is, but it's overshadowed by the other 99.9% of the garbage.
Implementing this feels impossible, though. There would be disagreement as to what constitutes an ad. I disagree with the author that advertising isn't an exercise of free speech; I think that would be a huge roadblock in any country that enshrines free speech rights.
The global economy would fracture, is what would happen. A good chunk of the top performing stocks would disappear, affecting banking, retirement, housing, just everything. Most of the communication channels people use today would disappear. The online tools even non-ad-businesses use to function would stop, so those businesses would grind to a halt. News would disappear. Products would stop getting made. (US) Politicians would freak the hell out because now they don't know how to get elected. It would be a categorical economic and social disaster.
I think about this a lot. Consider the difference between the tidy signage of Tokyo versus the pell-mell streetfronts of Hong Hong. Societies should be able to choose how businesses impinge the public space.
The sadest part is that we the consumers pay for having things constantly popping up infront of our eyes.
There should be a ”NoAds”-label on products that have chosen to not levy the ad-tax on us consumers.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
gcp123|11 months ago
The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings painfully true. The mechanical difference between getting someone to buy sneakers versus vote for a candidate is surprisingly small.
What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. We debate content moderation policies and algorithmic transparency, but rarely question the underlying attention marketplace that makes manipulation profitable in the first place.
The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic. We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm.
Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
Is this proposal radical? Absolutely. But sometimes the Overton window needs a sledgehammer.
P.S. If you are curious about the relationship between Sigmund Freud, propaganda, and the origins of the ad industry, check out the documentary “Century of the Self”.
Ferret7446|11 months ago
I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
dash2|11 months ago
* Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.
In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it!
* Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
* Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
* Banning billboards or other public advertising? Fine. Not new. Done all over the place for commonsensical reasons.
* Any article that talks about "blurry, “out-of-focus fascism”—that sense of discomfort that you feel but can't quite point out" is itself blurry and out-of focus, not to say absurd and hyperbolic. Calling a mild sense of psychological discomfort "fascism" is just embarrassing.
vjk800|11 months ago
Some limits exist on advertising exist in most countries. Do they respect free speech?
> * Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
Absolutely zero thought is never given on policing boundaries on anything. That's not how the legal system operates. All laws are approximations at best and grey areas get decided by courts on a case-by-case basis.
> * Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year
toomim|11 months ago
The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed?
What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
I hate advertising and propaganda. But the hard part IMO is drawing the line. Where's the line?
imiric|11 months ago
The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising.
Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising.
We can later quibble about edge cases and how to handle someone putting up a sign for their business. Many countries have regulations about visual noise, so that should be considered as well.
But it's pretty easy to distinguish advertising that seeks to manipulate, and putting a stop to that. Hell, we could start by surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether. That alone should remove the most egregious cases of privacy abuse.
stego-tech|11 months ago
The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages.
While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we cannot withdraw from even with ad and script blockers, because so much of society is built upon the advertising sector that it’s impossible to fully escape them. People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.
Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Let’s get rid of it.
snailmailman|11 months ago
It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over 10 minutes in.
On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
Animats|11 months ago
The US used to forbid prescription drug advertising. That seemed to work.
Ads for liquor, marijuana, and gambling are prohibited in many jurisdictions.
The FCC once limited the number of minutes of ads per hour on the public airwaves. That limit was below 10% of air time in the 1960s.
The SEC used to limit ads for financial products to dull "tombstone" ads, which appeared mostly in the Wall Street Journal.
A useful restriction might be to make advertising non tax deductible as a business expense. That encourages putting value into cost of goods sold rather than marketing.
iambateman|11 months ago
It feels like having a calmer public space is more in the public interest than reminding them to drink Miller Lite.
mikestew|11 months ago
Just got back from a trip to Florida. Billboards along every freeway, and 75% of them are personal injury lawyers. If you’re a resident of Redmond, it is an obnoxious contrast.
gameman144|11 months ago
Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life that someone else is trying to provide and the only missing link is that you don't know about it.
In both cases, it seems totally fine to have strict guardrails about what kinds of practices we deem not okay (e.g. banning advertising to children, or banning physical ads larger than some size or in some locations), but the extreme take of the article felt like it intentionally left no room for nuance.
Henchman21|11 months ago
hansmayer|11 months ago
hedayet|11 months ago
It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving smaller players a shot at visibility, and by making alternatives accessible to customers, without relying solely on monopolistic platforms or the randomness of word-of-mouth.
That said, today’s ad ecosystem is far from ideal - often opaque, invasive, and manipulative. Still, the underlying idea of advertising has real value. Fair advertising is a hard problem, and while reform is overdue, banning it outright would likely create even bigger ones.
rsolva|11 months ago
In Norway, we have a total ban on advertising on certain products, like alcohol and tobacco. We also have strict laws regulating advertising towards children and political messaging on TV and radio.
There is only one problem; these laws where made before the digital age, so they have been sidelined. Political parties buy ads on Facebook and Insta like there is no tomorrow and children are constantly exposed to ads on social media. Only the ban on alcohol and tobacco is somewhat successful.
The right next move would be to ban peronalized ads (ie tracking of personal data). This is the one factor that has made the advertising industry (with Google and Meta at the top) go completely of the rails.
amarant|11 months ago
The internet would change fundamentally. The article lists social networks as things that would disappear, and good riddance, but we'd also lose (free) search engines.
Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a hotel, I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors. Those sites are pretty much 100% advertising, but how else am I gonna find a hotel on the other side of the planet, in a country I've never been before?
You also run into some tricky hairsplitting questions. Where do you draw the line on advertising? Are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? Or is that advertising? I don't want to outlaw online shopping entirely, it's extremely handy! What about search engine results from those webshops? Free search engines will disappear, but let's say I have a paid account and search for "buy dell laptop". Are the results advertising? How do you differentiate and define the cases legally?
I think it's a good idea, but it's gonna be quite tricky to implement well. And executing this idea poorly is potentially quite bad.
Getting it implemented at all is going to be hard: even well executed, this idea is going to have a huge impact on the economy, and people are not going to like that. This idea would be good for democracy, but ironically democracy is not good for this idea.
YurgenJurgensen|11 months ago
willsmith72|11 months ago
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear
No they wouldn't.. the business model would change. Facebook sells ads to businesses and entertainment to consumers. People still want to be entertained.
What about the positive effects from advertising? Many products which I never knew existed have gone on to improve my life.
To kill addictive digital content (especially those targeted at young people), just go after them directly. I agree the world will be a better place once we don't spend 10-16 years old online. But the advertising argument doesn't make any sense to me.
James_K|11 months ago
doug-moen|11 months ago
I do remember a major scandal that occurred in the 1980's when somebody posted an advertisement to usenet. At the time, there was a lot of online discussion about why this was prohibited. I looked this up, and found that the internet backbone (the NSFNET) was funded by the NSF, who enforced an acceptable-use policy, prohibiting Backbone use for purposes “not in support of research and education.” [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/253671.253741]
So yes, it's possible, because we already did it once.
miki123211|11 months ago
It subsidizes basically all modern entertainment, from the filmmaking and sports industries (through TV Shows and sports broadcasts, respectively), to musicians and amateur filmmakers (through Spotify and Youtube).
The costs of advertising are ultimately passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices for products and services, not unlike a VAT or sales tax. Because rich people spend more money than the poor (citation needed), they end up paying a lot more of this "tax" while getting the same amount of entertainment for it.
Targeted advertising only exacerbated these dynamics. Because high-spenders are very desirable customers to have, companies can now demand more money for the ability to target them, which turns advertising from a linear to a progressive tax.
Advertising turned the internet into a sort of public commons, with no government intervention and the inevitable inefficiencies and inflexibilities that come with those. It gave us free, high-quality video and voice calls to anywhere across the world, free unlimited texting, including picture messaging and group conversations, free video hosting for everybody, regardless of scale, free music (through Youtube, Spotify and the radio), with at least some compensation to artists, free movies and TV shows (on free-to-air TV as well as through services like Pluto), excellent free educational content (e.g. 3b1b, university lecturers hosted on Youtube at no charge), as well as cheaper entertainment overall through ad-supported tiers.
I think framing things this way is important when discussing advertising regulation. Maybe we want more cheap groceries, don't care about cheaper luxury cars and don't mind less free entertainment, so maybe we should ban grocery ads and encourage more Mercedes ads. Maybe we're fine with less free entertainment if it gets us fewer alcoholics, so we ban ads for alcohol. Those are tradeoffs worth thinking about, perhaps tradeoffs worth making, but they are tradeoffs, and it is important to be conscious of that.
moolcool|10 months ago
Even if advertisers make more money from the rich (citation needed), the poor are still disproportionately negatively effected. I would argue that it's less ethical to persuade someone with $100 to their name to spend $10 on something they don't need, than to persuade someone with $1,000,000 to spend $500 on something they don't need.
To bolster this argument, look at the things that are most advertised to the poor: alcohol, gambling, fast food, and predatory loans (including predatory auto financing). The wealthy, meanwhile, are more likely to be targeted with ads for lifestyle goods: health foods, travel, gym memberships.
hvs|11 months ago
pastor_williams|11 months ago
That said this article glosses over the first amendment which absolutely needs to be considered because (at least in the United States) that is the big barrier to any sort of restriction.
Also the idea of what constitutes an ad. Billboards? What about large signs showing where a store is? Are people with big social media accounts allowed to tell us about their favorite products? Only if they don't get money? What if they get free products? We'll have financial audits I assume to make sure they aren't being sneaky. No more sponsored videos? What about listing the patreons that made the video possible?
How will this be sold to the people that need ads for their small business? We'll need a majority support to pass a constitutional amendment.
Anyway, this seems impossible but good luck!
lordnacho|11 months ago
Tell me, do you think Roger Federer really appreciates that watch he's selling you? Does he really use that coffee machine that he sells, and thinks it's the best one?
We know what his motivation is, he is not your friend who bought a watch and a coffee machine, used them, and recommended them to you. He gets paid by the producers of the stuff he endorses.
Plainly, advertisers have discovered a loophole in the human psyche, and are exploiting it. We evolved to take in recommendations from people we know, and billboards/TV/etc are close enough to the real thing to trigger _something_ in us that doesn't just work when it's a non-celebrity whose face we don't know. The effect is big enough that celebrities get paid a gigantic amount of money to pretend they are someone you trust and recommend some product they never even thought about until they got given the deal.
I think we should tax that kind of thing. I'm not restricting his free speech. Roger is free to stand in front of the opera in Zürich and tell random strangers that they should buy the coffee machine. But if you put it in mass media, there should be a gigantic tax.
etempleton|11 months ago
1. You probably only know about half the things you like, enjoy, and use because of advertising. Did you see a trailer for a movie on YouTube you wanted to watch? That is an ad for a movie. Did you get a demo disc for a new band at a party or club in the 90s? That is an ad. Did you see the concert lineup poster? Ad. No one complains when advertising is done well and provides utility.
2. Ads subsidize things you enjoy. Browsers, search engines, television, your tv, most websites, are all subsidized through advertising. You can say would prefer to just pay full price for it and avoid the ads, but most people clearly would not like to when given the option.
3. What even is an ad? What is the line? Are store signs an ad? Are movie trailers? Defining what an ad is and isn’t is messy and a bit silly.
4. The alternative may be worse. What happens when traditional ads stop working? Businesses still need to get their message out, so what do they do? They hire YouTubers to play talk positively about their product, they wine and dine journalists and publications for favorable coverage, which becomes easy because without ads they are hurting for revenue. If ads were banned this would get worse.
It is nice to opine about a utopia without ads, and believe me, I often do, but the reality is advertising has been around for thousands of years and integral to how business and even society works.
gpsx|11 months ago
asimpletune|11 months ago
E.g. If a business want to run an ad in the newspaper, go for it. But if they want to follow me around on the internet and collect information on everything that I do, then they should be required to record what they collect. Congress could then vote to make laws introducing taxes on that quantity.
Once this stuff is measured then appropriate counter measures could be taken to discourage socially damaging enterprises.
nullbio|11 months ago
wronex|11 months ago
senderista|11 months ago
Advertising certainly has plenty of negative externalities, but the positive externalities of the free ad-funded services I mentioned are absolutely mind-boggling. Try to imagine living without them (if you couldn't afford to pay for them yourself).
hatutah|11 months ago
squarefoot|11 months ago
harimau777|11 months ago
Make it illegal to make statements that are not objectively true. E.g. you can't say that your product is "the best", you can only say specifically how it is better.
Put restrictions on advertising an idealized version of a product and then selling a lesser version. E.g. the difference between what fast food ads show versus what you get. I'm sure it would be difficult to completely fix that since it's so subjective, but we could probably get incremental improvements.
eviks|11 months ago
But humanity has never been free of non-current forms of advertising
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear
No the wouldn't, you can still monetize addictive without ads
> Think about what's happened since 2016 ... fracture our social fabric along existing fault lines.
Just think about what happened before 2016 and how many times the social fabric had been fractured (sometimes also with foreign actors) ...
ChrisMarshallNY|11 months ago
For example, highly relevant PSAs and warnings could be considered “ads.” They can be every bit as obnoxious as “penis pill” ads, but they convey information that may be of life and death importance.
The placards outside professional offices are ads; possibly the oldest form of advertising.
In-store signage are ads, and can cost sellers a lot of money.
You could argue that “shelf-stackers,” and “endcap displays” employed by supermarkets, are a form of advertising.
Sales people rely on personal relationships, and get quite skilled at making every conversation they have, into a sales pitch (which can get annoying).
Promotion is a very complex system, and often goes far beyond simple signage. For many businesses, it’s a matter of life and death.
People that run businesses probably can’t live without them, and are willing to pay a pretty penny for ads.
One thing that might be relevant, are “ad books,” like the old-fashioned Yellow Pages, “pennysaver” papers, or the “brand books,” used by designers. These are ads, but gathered into a place where they are expected, and actively sought out.
In the last century, we often called variants of these, “catalogs.”
basisword|11 months ago
But there is a certain kind of advertising that is detrimental. My first thought is Amazon 'sponsored' products. Allowing companies to pay money to put inferior products at the top of search results is bad for society. Same goes for Google sponsored search results. Sponsored content in general is terrible. People that have gained your trust selling you things and not actually telling you they are being paid to do so. There are many many digital ads that would not be allowed IRL because they would be stopped for false advertising by regulators.
Like most things in life these days, the problem is not the thing itself. The problem is the Wild West that is the internet where there is minimal regulation allowing people to lie, cheat and get away with it.
or_am_i|11 months ago
Stay away from the algorithmic feeds, instead get to know your authors and choose them explicitly. Stay away from the personalized ads, pay for content you care about, block what can be blocked, avoid the rest. Learn active banner blindness: catch your attention drifting and look away. Uninstall reels, tiktok, youtube, sanitize your life from short term attention grabbers. Turn off that TV. Mute your car radio. Practice focus: take a book and set a timer. Lock yourself up in a room with a hobby project. Meditate. Set up a ritual with a friend or family, as long as you still got any. Make smalltalk to strangers. Get to know your neighbors. Plan that getaway. Choose your life!
BLKNSLVR|11 months ago
That would shed some initial societal parasites. See what's left, and then go after the next biggest / grossest topic in the space.
I could get behind that particular brandishing of chainsaw.
jongjong|11 months ago
Big tech has been mass-spamming us with unsolicited content for decades and driving monopolization, centralizing opportunities towards those who can talk the talk and away from those who can walk the walk. So we've been getting lower value for our money and also losing jobs/opportunities which has made it harder to earn money.
It's crazy that big tech is allowed to spam hundreds of millions of people with unsolicited content but if any individual did it on the same scale, they'd be in jail.
chasebank|11 months ago
financetechbro|11 months ago
markus_zhang|11 months ago
I feel it's impossible to get rid of those Ads platforms such as Google or Microsoft. Businesses need them. If you ask me, I'd say, government should levy a heavy tax on Ads , so basically like gas stations, they are only allowed say 10% of profit margin, and they must cap their ads somehow. Ads is basically a public service, and every public service, if not run by the State, should only allow a very small margin of profit, like public transit and such.
MoonZ|11 months ago
Big companies where revenues are based on marketing would collapse, the market fragments (which is good), smaller companies are created instead, better diversity of local products and services. Better wealth distribution. More money for the government, hopefully better public services.
With less flashy products and services, people have a better purchasing power, even considering they'll have to pay for services they use, like reviews. Review companies would need strict controls to be put in place against corruption.
It would probably also change a lot of nonsensical landscapes (ex: sports)
Advertising is evil.
lvass|11 months ago
Also big tech would be incentivized to sell even more user data, as their business would still mostly exist, either via subscriptions, or through the now even more profitable user data market with more expensive targeted shilling.
defanor|11 months ago
IIRC there is a Dilbert comic strip about that.
> Clickbait [...] would become worthless overnight
Advertisement is not the only incentive. E.g., the Veritasium YouTube channel's host explicitly switched to clickbait, explaining it by his intent to reach a wider audience. Another example is clickbait submission titles on HN, not all of which are for the sake of advertisement (unless you count HN submissions in general as advertisements themselves, of course).
> When I say advertising, I also mean propaganda. Propaganda is advertising for the state
Not necessarily for the state, the usual definition includes furthering of ideas in general. In more oppressive regimes, propaganda of certain ideas is actually banned, as it used to be in even more places ("heresy" and suchlike). Combined with selective enforcement, it is as good as banning all propaganda. It may be a particularly bad example of such a ban, but still an illustration of the dangers around it.
I think a better path towards the world without (or almost without) commercial advertising is not via coercion, but as kaponkotrok mentioned in another comment, via education and public discussion (which may also be called "propaganda"), shifting social norms to make such advertisement less acceptable. People can make advertisements unprofitable if they will choose to: not just by ignoring them (including setting ad blockers), but also by intentionally preferring products not connected to unpleasant and shady tactics, including those beyond advertisement: slave labor and other human rights violations, unsustainable energy sources, global warming, animal cruelty, monopolies, proprietary or bloated software and hardware are some of the common examples. Social norms and such enforcement seem to be less brittle than laws are, and harder to turn into an oppression mechanism.
Although, since I brought up monopolies and other issues, perhaps state agencies may also usefully assist with restriction of advertisement, as they do with those. Social norms and laws are not mutually exclusive, after all.
djoldman|11 months ago
Some thought experiments:
What do [search engines, social networks, newspapers] look like? I assume they'd all be paid and you'd get some free tastes and then decide which you'd pay for in the long term (à la kagi).
By removing the third party payer, the service provider has no incentive to do anything for them, whether aligned or not with the user. That is the big plus.
What about all the money that companies use to promote their products and services through advertisements and marketing? Some portion of that would probably go to making their products better. The rest... from their standpoint, how do they even get a potential customer to know they exist? That's tough.
grishka|11 months ago
That said, I don't think it's appropriate to outlaw all advertising. It should still be allowed in places where you'd be open to it anyway: in stores and other places where you spend money anyway, and in specialized publications that exist for people who intentionally want to be advertised to.
However, for when you're buying something, upselling (any questions by the seller that may result in you buying something you didn't intend to buy originally) should be illegal. It feels very insulting to me.
bee_rider|11 months ago
In terms of “let’s try this surprising new change in the laws,” I’d rather see it become illegal to collect a lot of information about people. Maybe we can consider what Facebook/Google and data brokers do something like stalking.
freetime2|11 months ago
The best ads and brands are an iconic part of our culture - something cherished and celebrated by many. I think this is worth keeping in mind at least when talking about banning advertisements.
siliconc0w|11 months ago
sebastian_z|11 months ago
While advertising messages may not be themselves particularly important for free speech and can be even detrimental to it, e.g., propaganda, sites themselves disseminate speech and are often third-party ad-financed. What could be a good business model for them (other than direct payments)?
blobbers|11 months ago
It becomes a question of what truly is an ad?
That said I appreciate this sort of thought; it would even be nice for it to be implemented, but whether it could be enforced is another question. At that point it then becomes a question of who you allow to advertise.
For a long time, hedge funds were not allowed to solicit investments publicly under rule 502c of reg D.
I could see grounds to restrict things further; I’m sick of restless leg syndrome drug treatment ads…
molybdenum_plus|11 months ago
Of course, a ban on advertising will never happen, because it's very useful to some people. I'm more concerned with the general pattern of thinking that goes:
1. I greatly dislike thing and think thing is bad. 2. Thing should therefore be illegal.
We should be less eager to use the power of law to mold the world to our preferences. It should be a solemn undertaking to use the law! It's an instrument of coercive power and should really be held in reserve as much as possible. Otherwise, we're all just petty tyrants sniping one another for minor transgressions.
There are many things that are very bad that nonetheless must be legal in a free society! I realize this is a uniquely American right, but I nonetheless believe "hate speech" must remain legal. It is bad, yes. I do not like it. I really wish it didn't happen. However, it is markedly less bad than entrusting some byzantine bureaucracy or benevolent dictator to adjudicate the meaning of hate speech. I greatly prefer a world with hate speech to one in which we apply legal authority to eliminate hate speech.
ddimitrov|11 months ago
I am no longer into hackathons, but I would pay good money for such a product. Bonus points if it is styled like Nada's glasses from They Live.
unknown|11 months ago
[deleted]
bradleyy|11 months ago
```Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers```
I want to believe that the author is hopelessly naive, and not a more nefarious actor. These traditional media gatekeepers are not by any means friendly to democracy; they're literal tools of the state, and actively work against the interests of the populace. I say this without a hint of irony: I trust social media more.
gcp123|11 months ago
Modern advertising doesn't just sell products, it sells our own attention back to us at a premium. What started as "connecting products to people who need them" has warped into engineering digital environments that hack our baseline neurological responses.
The most disturbing part is that most people inside the machine know it. I've sat in rooms where we've explicitly designed systems to maximize "time on site" by exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities. The language we use internally is more clinical than predatory, which makes it easy to avoid moral questions.
What's wild is how this piece frames advertising as a relatively recent phenomenon. It's right - for 99% of human history, we made purchasing decisions based on community knowledge and direct information, not carefully engineered psychological triggers that follow us around.
Sure, banning all advertising sounds extreme, but it's worth asking: what would we actually lose? Product information would still exist. Reviews would still exist. Word-of-mouth would still exist. We'd just lose the sophisticated machinery designed to bypass our rational decision-making.
The "free speech" counter-argument has always struck me as disingenuous. Nobody believes they have a constitutional right to interrupt your dinner with a telemarketing call.
jrwiegand|11 months ago
phtrivier|11 months ago
In civilized countries, this could be done by taxation (limit the mass) and regulation (limit the excesses.)
Use the country of the advertisment target audience to decide which juridiction applies.
I'm pretty sure advertisers have to be aware of the country their targeting, given that they know me better than my spouse.
qwertox|11 months ago
* First 3 months 9.99€, 42.99€ per month thereafter, 1 year minimum
Veserv|11 months ago
One of the key distinguishing factors is that "bad" advertising is intentionally deceptive. The explicit objective is how to overstate colloquially while technically saying something that is not untrue if interpreted by a genie or monkey's paw. Advertisers run war rooms and focus groups to make sure that the message they are promoting is verifiably and scientifically misinterpreted by the target audience while having legal review so that if it comes to court they can say: "Technically, your honor..." we meant something different than what we explicitly and intentionally aimed for.
The standard is backwards. The more money you spend on advertising, the more intentionally truthful it should be. You should run focus groups to verify that the message is not misinterpreted to your benefit the larger the advertising campaign. When you go to court and say: "Technically, your honor..." you should immediately lose (after reaching certain scales of advertising where you can be expected to have the resources to review your statements). Misinterpretation should be a honest surprise occurring despite your best efforts, not because of them and the litmus test should be if your efforts were reasonable at your scale to avoid such defective speech.
The standard is trivially assessable in court: Present the message to the target audience and ask them their interpretation. Compare it to the claims of deception. If the lawyer says: "Technically, your honor..." they lose. However, they can present evidence that they made reasonable efforts to avoid misinterpretation and that the specific form of the misinterpretation is unlikely or unexpected.
The standard is easily achieved by businesses. Make intentionally truthful claims and have your advertising teams check and test for misinterpretation. Err on the side of caution and do not overstate your claims to your benefit and the potential detriment of your customers. If you think "technically speaking", you are on the wrong track. If you would not tell that candidly to your relatives or friends, you should probably stop.
It is not like people do not know they are being deceptive, they just need to be held to it.
ndr|11 months ago
In most jurisdictions there are, at times weaponized, limitations, and that's the tradeoff those jurisdiction landed on.
I don't see how this proposed limitation could produce acceptable weaponizations.
Just think for a second how outlandish these would sound with such limitation in place:
- The ban on "persuasive content" is used to shut down political dissent labeled as "unwanted influence."
- Independent journalists are silenced when their reporting is categorized as "promotional advertising."
- Fundraising for humanitarian causes is outlawed as "solicitation advertising."
- Religious discussions are prohibited as "advertising spiritual beliefs" or "donation to the organized religion."
- Medical awareness campaigns are shut down as "advertising health concerns."
- Environmental activism is criminalized as "advertising eco-agendas."
There would be just no end of these.
cafard|10 months ago
mdnahas|11 months ago
Companies provide what the customer wants. And, as the adage goes, if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Advertisement-funded “news” isn’t meant to enrich the reader/viewer — it is meant to attract the reader/viewer.
I think that perverted incentive has always existed with it, but the internet ad technology has really killed the information content. And now we’re have society-scale problems with misinformed citizens.
I don’t think industry will solve the problem. If a company allowed users to opt out and pay, their richest customers would do that and those were the ones most valuable to advertise to. So, offering an opt-out probably loses them money (and increases costs).
I think the news industry should be advertising free. I’d have to think on if it should also have govt funding, but that often gets co-opted.
danielmarkbruce|11 months ago
GuB-42|11 months ago
- Job offers
- Jobseeking
- Dating
- Public service announcements
- Word-of-mouth
- Sponsoring
- Political campaigns
- Fundraisers
- Endorsements
- Recommendations
And many others
If you ban all forms of advertising, society will grind to a halt, even before considering free speech. How can a business be successful if no one knows that it exists? Advertising connects people who need something to people who provide it. It absolutely essential to society and in a sense, it predates humans, if we consider mating as a form of advertising, like peacocks using their tails as some kind of a biological billboard.
I understand what the author means, he is annoyed by ad breaks, banners, and tracking, we all are, and he would like to see less of them, we all do, except whoever makes money over these banners that is.
The author suggests banning paid-for advertisement. But how far will it go? For example, you want to print flyers to promote your business. Is it illegal for the print shop to print your flyers, as they are making money on advertising. Classified ads will become illegal too, forget about craigslist and the likes.
It kinds of remind me of some "abolitionist" laws on prostitution that some countries have. Prostitution is legal, based on the idea that people own their bodies and people have the right to have sex, but everything surrounding prostitution is not, including advertising and pimping. The definition for pimping can go far, for example renting a room to a prostitute can be considered pimping. The idea is essentially to make prostitution illegal without writing it explicitly. A blanket ban on advertising will do that, but for all businesses.
As always, for every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple and wrong.
amrangaye|10 months ago
xzjis|11 months ago
If any French speakers are interested, I believe it was this YouTube channel (which is very interesting anyway for discussions about fascism, advertising, manipulation, etc.): https://youtube.com/@hacking-social
willywanker|10 months ago
dzikimarian|11 months ago
Problem starts, when I'm scrolling $socialWebsite and I see ton of biking ads, because some Orwellian ad network is tracking me through time & space.
Then content starts to serve as means to push ads into my eyes whenever I dare to open them. If content is crap - doesn't matter - if I switch to other source ad will follow.
What's worse - many people were brainwashed into believing that's normal. I remember guy from Chrome team, who published draft for web attestation. He was convinced he's doing good thing because brands have "right" to be sure they're getting real eyeballs and he was just making this process "better" for the users.
zhyder|11 months ago
It means the expensive product/service gets your attention, coz it can afford a higher bid, instead of the one that's better for you. It also sets a high floor on prices.
To some extent the bidding process was needed when there was inherent scarcity of inventory to place information (e.g. billboards or the 1 local radio station), but there's no scarcity online. Why can't we just have a web where product/service info is listed, and people can seek that info through some search engine?
account-5|11 months ago
x62Bh7948f|11 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Was_Plugged_In
poulsbohemian|10 months ago
rocqua|11 months ago
Movies set in our world, for example, should be allowed to show real cars, real phones, etc. But that is nigh impossible to prevent from becoming a fight for getting your product placed. And lots of similar places.
It might be possible to outlaw ads targeted more narrowly than a bit of content (i.e. advertisers have to choose, ahead of publication, what content to put their ads next to.) Combining this with banning some of the more direct advertising might work. Though perhaps a world where advertising is purely done through product placement is also horribly distopian.
jopsen|11 months ago
The we have any robustness towards propaganda/ads is that we're being bombarded with contradicting arguments.
In a society without would be more susceptible to propaganda. Just just we outlaw it, just doesn't stop bad actors.
That there are lots of places we forbid advertising. Bill boards along the road. Content targeted minors.
We are also lots of advertising we could outlaw: regulated medicin, loans, gambling.
We could regulate what ads can say: products must be sold advertised price (fine print not allowed).
Lots of things could we that don't outlaw all advertising. Look around world you'll find many examples such regulations.
unknown|11 months ago
[deleted]
ayaros|11 months ago
kelnos|11 months ago
Advertising is just psychological manipulation. Any argument that there's "good" advertising that respects the target and is merely informative... well, maybe there is, but it's overshadowed by the other 99.9% of the garbage.
Implementing this feels impossible, though. There would be disagreement as to what constitutes an ad. I disagree with the author that advertising isn't an exercise of free speech; I think that would be a huge roadblock in any country that enshrines free speech rights.
But man, that would be great.
0xbadcafebee|11 months ago
wskish|11 months ago
reboot81|11 months ago