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Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

schneier.com

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Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#41

Post by AntiImperialist »

user-the-name wrote: post #39
AntiImperialist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With freedom, humans can control for this by learning from it. They can see that cars don't necessarily get you women despite of what the ads say. This can also be indirect learning by someone pointing it out. If you start making certain things illegal to say, you can use that against people. For example, given enough money for lawyers, you can sue people for saying that "these cars don't get you women" using the sam…

Nonsense. There are plenty of things you are not allowed to say, and nobody is using them as "loopholes". False advertising is a crime already, for one.

>and nobody is using them as "loopholes"

Yes, they are.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#42

Post by zupatol »

lordnacho wrote: post #26

I wrote this for a related article yesterday: --- If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("…

Some economists have tried arguing that advertising adds value to products, but I think it only hinders people from making choices based on the product's merit. It's a distortion of the market.

We wouldn't lose much if advertising would just be forbidden. A traditional definition of it would probably be enough to get rid of most of it. The main problem is that huge sums of money are involved, and almost all media profit from it to some extent, so there's a huge incentive to shut down this conversation.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#43

Post by user-the-name »

AntiImperialist wrote: post #41
user-the-name wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. There are plenty of things you are not allowed to say, and nobody is using them as "loopholes". False advertising is a crime already, for one.

> and nobody is using them as "loopholes" Yes, they are.

Who is using false advertising laws as loopholes, then?

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#44

Post by yurielt »

The article is not honest for the way that it presents some of its support arguments it tries to make it seems as if society is solely affected by this technologies in a vacuum or as if polarization in America just happened magically but this is far from the truth when we look at technology like that we can’t do a proper analysis we become parrots of simple platitudes

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#45

Post by yurielt »

user-the-name wrote: post #43
AntiImperialist wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and nobody is using them as "loopholes" Yes, they are.

Who is using false advertising laws as loopholes, then?

Lol just of the top of my head companies like Coca Cola and also the guy who sued red bull for actually not getting wings

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#46

Post by scatters »

names_are_hard wrote: post #28
UweSchmidt wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that the $200 ultimately come from our pockets. We are paying those $200 anyway through markups on products ads made us buy.

Not necessarily. I don't know what percentage of advertising revenue is from political advertising, but that's money that Facebook makes off of you that doesn't come out of your pocket. Essentially any time you're shown an ad that aims to convince you to support some idea, or vote for something, or change your behavior in some way (like going vegan) instead of trying to get you go spend money, you provide value to Fa…

Money spent on political advertising absolutely comes out of your pocket. The process is: politicians levy taxes and excise, divert the revenue to linked entities, pay Facebook out of the proceeds. Or they extract money from companies under threat of expropriation via adverse regulation and litigation. In developing countries this is blatant; in developed countries it is disguised (as lobbying, consulting fees etc.).

In fairness, there is an argument that at least some political advertising is consumption by politically engaged citizenry who don't stand to gain financially from the result; witness spending on unwinnable Senate races in the latest election, for example. But in general you have to assume that political advertising comes with some expectation of return, which comes out of the everyday citizen's pocket.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#47

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

names_are_hard wrote: post #28
UweSchmidt wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that the $200 ultimately come from our pockets. We are paying those $200 anyway through markups on products ads made us buy.

Not necessarily. I don't know what percentage of advertising revenue is from political advertising, but that's money that Facebook makes off of you that doesn't come out of your pocket. Essentially any time you're shown an ad that aims to convince you to support some idea, or vote for something, or change your behavior in some way (like going vegan) instead of trying to get you go spend money, you provide value to Fa…

I can't remember ever seeing an ad on Facebook trying to convince me to go vegan or do anything public-spirited.

Ever.

I have however seen plenty of ads trying to get me to spend money on something/someone.

And conflating the political process with the marketing process is absolutely pernicious in a democracy. The Brexit campaign used micro-targeting of individuals with knowingly dishonest ads that played to their biasses.

That's not persuasion - that's just manipulation.

Put simply, no one should ever be allowed to run organised campaigns based on lying and distortion for any reason. If you need to lie you don't have anything valid to say in the first place so removing you from the public discourse causes no harm to anyone.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#48

Post by roenxi »

lordnacho wrote: post #26

I wrote this for a related article yesterday: --- If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("…

That point is sort-of pointless. It would be fair to boil a lot of the argument there down to "People don't act randomly. They have reasons for what they are doing. I think their reasons are bad".

I can't argue with that, but the alternatives are worse. If you centralise power, sooner or later the advertising exec gets control of the powerful body, and now you can't choose to resist even if you can see that what is happening is bad.

A key part of the free market is precisely that the world is actually quite predictable. The fact that people sometimes make predictably bad choices doesn't especially undermine the free market. The market doesn't require people make good choices, it just redirects resources to people who make better choices than the average.

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#49

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

sneak wrote: post #38
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #34

As usual for Schneier, a thoughtful, complete, balanced article. It will be hard to put guardrails on this stuff. It's pretty much 100% "gray area," easy to cast in many ways.

I'm a little sad to see him falling into the "we are under attack and something must be done!" narrative around free and open discussion on the internet. By all accounts, the election system in the US is working, most people aren't antivaxxers, and belief in an undetectable wizard in the sky seems to be falling. We are winning the war against misinformation. Why are so many smart people claiming that we aren't, and t…

Here's one. There are plenty of others.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-media-...

Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

#50

Post by user-the-name »

yurielt wrote: post #45
user-the-name wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is using false advertising laws as loopholes, then?

Lol just of the top of my head companies like Coca Cola and also the guy who sued red bull for actually not getting wings

What person was prevented from speaking there?
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