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.
What if we made advertising illegal?
661–670 of 1001 posts
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#662Interesting but the issue is that you can't just ban advertising because it has many aspects.
20% discount or tv ads are a form of advertising, easy to spot. What about sponsored content ?
It's already trickier to detect, and even then there are sponsored content where someone is paid to showcase, review or straight up lie about a product quality.
If I make a great job with a customer and I tell him, make everyone you know aware how great I am. That's also a form of advertising.
Just being myself is advertising for myself, if I'm good at something, I can take part in a talent tv show and purposely avetise my skills to tv viewer.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. So that would exclude: - listing your house, or car in the classifieds - buying a sign for your business (ad discussed in other posts) - buying a garage sale sign - buying a for sale sign, or flyers for your house for sale - paying a realtor to sell your house - paying a reporter or professional reviewer to write a review…
Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising.
Listing a house for sale on an agent’s website: not advertising.
Promoting that listing or the agent on the home page of a local news site: advertising
etc…
Some cases will be harder, all are decidable. We are talking about law not code, so there’s no need for a perfect algorithm, the legal system is designed precisely to deal with these sorts of question.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#664This 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 sample…
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…
What if I "win" a BMW and I can't stop talking about it on social media?
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs). Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge…
That is requiring advertisers to set the HTTP evil bit. If advertising is fine, they're happy to make it obvious that something is an ad. If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement. I'd be surprised if banning billboards caused advertising budgets to drop.
> If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement
Then put them in jail, that's why we've built them.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#666In 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
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#667What about ads from governments and organisations that promote mental health awareness, DEI, etc.?
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#668This 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 sample…
There is no line, to fully and strictly ban advertising we basically have to abandon democracy and capitalism. Advertising and capitalism a so tightly related that you can't have one without the other.
You want no ads? Cool, let's familiarize yourself with North Korea.
People might want to rather opt for ethical ad standards and regulations, something fundamental like... GDPR.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#669This sort of thinking is exactly why Big Tech shifted from being left Democratic in Obama's time to being center-right Republican in Trump 2024 election.
Demonizing ads comparing it to Heroin and tools of authoritarian regime is a MASSIVE hipérbole. Go to look at heroin addicts. Go to look at people that click on a personalized ad with cookies that knows they want to buy a new fridge. They are very far apart.
It's like claiming the electricity company holds you slave. Go look at what slavery was.
The simple truth is that Big Tech is incredibly powerful because they earned it. They made incredible technology that helped humanity moving forward. Yes there is a great power imbalance now. Yes it would be better if that power was less concentrated. But it also wrong to demonize Big Tech, to paint them as evil Machiavelli's dealing drugs. What we need is a new generation of Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Apple. Yes Steve Jobs in order to build Apple in his own time painted IBM as evil, but it was done in an ad (paradoxically) and it wasn't the whole government passing laws against IBM just to reduce it's power. I'm European and GDPR in Europe was in my opinion a very bad move. I don't think third party cookies are that bad. And people that think that they are bad they usually don't know how they work. Companies shouldn't directly export your plaintext data to others. Third part cookies didn't do that.
So stop painting ads like heroine. Once you destroy Google you will have destroyed also the income that allowed Google to give us free (g)mail, free maps, chromium and then node, Android and a ton of other products I'm not remembering right now.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. So that would exclude: - listing your house, or car in the classifieds - buying a sign for your business (ad discussed in other posts) - buying a garage sale sign - buying a for sale sign, or flyers for your house for sale - paying a realtor to sell your house - paying a reporter or professional reviewer to write a review…
It's remarkable that you put all that thought into coming up with holes in my one-line argument, and no thought into steelmanning it.
Since we're coming up with hypothetical laws and loopholes, here is a simple addendum to my original argument:
- Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR.
There. That avoids penalizing most of the personal advertising scenarios you mentioned. Since laws are never a couple of sentences long, I'm sure with more thought we'd be able to find a good balance that prevents abuse, but not legitimate use cases for informing people about a product or service.
Again, the goal is not to get into philosophical discussions about what constitutes advertising, and banning commercial speech, or whatever constitutional right exists. The goal is to prevent companies from abusing people's personal data, profiling them, selling their profiles on dark markets, allowing mass psychological manipulation that is threating our democratic processes, and in general, from corrupting every communication channel in existence. Surely there are ways of accomplishing this without endless discussions about semantics and free speech.
But, as I've said in other threads, this is all wishful thinking. There is zero chance that the people in power who achieved it by these means will suddenly decide to regulate themselves and kill their golden goose. Nothing short of an actual revolution will bring this system down.
> And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists.
Agreed. In the olden days before digital ads, product catalogs worked well. Companies would buy ad space in specific print media, and consumers interested in buying a product would consult the catalog for the type of product they're looking for. Making ads pull rather than push solves this awareness problem proponents of advertising deem so important. The reason they prefer the push approach is because it's many times more profitable for all involved parties. The only victims in this system are the people outside of it. The current system is making a consumer of everyone every time they interact with any content, when the reality is that people are only consumers when they're actively looking to buy something. Most of the time we just want to consume the content we're interested in, without being sold anything. It's the wrong approach, with harmful results, and the only reason we stuck with it is because it's making someone else very rich. It's absolute insanity.