8 ms·

> This is an industry that sells influence at scale. Anyone with a credit card can start changing how people think and act but there are absolutely no real con

by edanm 9y ago

> This is an industry that sells influence at scale. Anyone with a credit card can start changing how people think and act but there are absolutely no real consequences for bad actors. Isn't this true of almost any industry which lets you put out information? E.g. news publishing? Book publishing? Blogs? I mean, what exactly would you do, ban all communications? Maybe I missed something, but it seems like everyone just assumes that advertising is the #1 biggest influence on most people, and was used to completely change the tide of democracy, when in reality it seems to me that it's a small part of the problem, at most. I'm serious about the question btw - what would you do? You say regulate at the core. I'm not saying necessarily don't regulate (though that is where I lean) - I'm asking, what exactly do you propose?

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> what would you do? 1. Break up Facebook under anti-trust law. Social network share is as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, market share. 2. Pass an American GDPR. Consumers get an absolute right to audit and delete their data. Explicit consent is required for each instance of third-party sharing. Companies are liable to their users for breaches, with a minimum amount claimable through an easily-accessibly regulator.
- hammock 9y ago
  1) requires a doj investigation and high court ruling, not to mention your particular case "social media share" is without precedent
  - jodrellblank 9y ago
    Time to set a precedent then.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Well, 1 could also be taken care of by Congress passing a new law. But I think the more interesting alternative is Zuck deciding to do it on his own. There's no reason he couldn't create a nonprofit and give it the "natural monopoly" pieces. That would certainly include identity and the social graph, and maybe a publishing interchange. Then Facebook could step back and compete on the non-monopoly pieces. The client, of course. But all the add-ons. Groups and events and marketplace and whatever else. Google, Twitter, Amazon, and probably Apple would probably quickly create their own social clients. And would also join some nonprofit advisory board, which would help to set protocols and standards.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  Sure, but neither of those have anything to do with what this thread is talking about. Data ownership and privacy are important, but this thread is about GP's claim that (paraphrased) the fundamental problem is that advertising is the ability to buy influence at scale, and that "bad actors" aren't prevented from doing so.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > the fundamental problem is that advertising is the ability to buy influence at scale Breaking up Facebook reduces all those scaling factors.
    - wutbrodo 9y ago
      Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying. I'm still not so sure it's true though. Is it materially different to go buy from 5 ad brokers instead of 1? Or from ad exchanges that automate it for your? It's hard for me to see how this would have much of an effect, beyond mildly increasing the cost.
- 734786710934 9y ago
  What would breaking up Facebook look like? Most features of Facebook couldn't operate as standalone businesses without creating their own massive ad networks.
  - coupdetaco 9y ago
    Facebook the company, not facebook the application.
  - titanomachy 9y ago
    Instagram and WhatsApp worked fine before they were part of Facebook.
    - 734786710934 9y ago
      Both were being run off of VC money when Facebook acquired them. They would be in Snapchat's shoes right now if they were still independent.
    - wemdyjreichert 9y ago
      They are not the issue so much as FBs core business.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > What would breaking up Facebook look like? Crack it along its social graph(s) or separate the platform (which would become a regulated utility) from the advertising business. Mergers offer four broad categories of synergies [1]: demand-side, supply-side, political and administrative. Airline mergers are usually about demand-side synergies. Having more market share gives you better data about future trends. It also gives you pricing power. Media/telecom mergers tend to rely on supply-side synergies: prices won't be raised, but content suppliers can be squeezed for distribution. When Lockheed Martin bought Sikorsky it acquired lots of employees in Connecticut [2]; that bought them some bulldogs in the Congress. (Administrative synergies are mostly B.S.; they fall into the "you have an accounting department, we have an accounting department, combined we can have just one" category and were mostly disproven in the post-WWII conglomerate boom.) Facebook is a super aggregator [3]; it has both demand-side and supply-side monopolistic synergies. Cracking the demand side means users go to sleep with a Facebook account and wake up with a Facebook No. 3 account. (Or to sleep with an Instagram account and wake up with an Instagram account.) This worked for AT&T and could be done today (at significant expense to Facebook's shareholders as it was to Standard Oil's, AT&T's and Microsoft's). Cleaving social graphs is complicated. But we understand graph theory better today than we did in AT&T's days. Bonus: require an open inter-operability standard if these networks want to interconnect. Cracking the supply side would involve taking related advertisers and hiving them off into a separate advertising company. The Facebook platform left would be a natural monopoly, regulated like a utility, serving dual profit and public roles. (Messenger, Instagram, M, and other relatively-discrete products would similarly be spun off.) TL; DR The novelty of breaking up a Facebook is superficial and finds precedent in antitrust enforcement history. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/synergy.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/synergy.asp [2] http://www.courant.com/business/hc-sikorsky-connecticut-20160920-story.html http://www.courant.com/business/hc-sikorsky-connecticut-2016... [3] https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/ https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/
- gesman 9y ago
  This: "Pass an American GDPR."
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > 1. Break up Facebook under anti-trust law. Social network share is as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, market share. You should better ask why the mass of people registered on it to let this happen. It is not that privacy activists have not been warning all the time... To give a little background: In Germany (where there is a lot more concern for privacy) Facebook never got that deeply ingrained into the daily habits of most people. It is also not uncommon that at a social gathering people explicitly tell you that they don't desire that any photos that were taken here to be put on Facebook.
  - wsy 9y ago
    > You should better ask why the mass of people registered on it to let this happen. Social networks gravitate towards oligopolies(+), because people go wherever everybody else is. Even in Germany, there is a social price to pay for not having a Facebook account. (+) Oligopolies, because there seems to be a age generation effect: children don't use the network where their parents are. This is one of the areas where self-regulation simply doesn't work.
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      > Even in Germany, there is a social price to pay for not having a Facebook account. I often write here at HN that there is no "objective" status in society, but rather status in various, often vaguely defined groups in the society, where the individual status symbols can even contradict each other. It is not my impression that all in all I had to pay a social price for not having a Facebook account at any time (quite the opposite). Rather in some groups this lead to a social malus, but in other groups it gave a large social bonus.
      - wsy 9y ago
        I fully agree that this highly depends on the groups to which you belong. Personally, I have not experienced a malus for not having a Facebook account, but I know of occurrences (e.g., a student learning group organizing their communication via Facebook). For myself, I have faced a potential social price for not having a WhatsApp account that was large enough to let me create an account.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 9y ago
People keep seeing "regulate" and reading it as "ban". The UK regulates what you can advertise (no prescription pharma, for example) and extremely limits political advertising and spending. This results in a culture where local volunteers are important and you don't get weird lie-based adverts smearing candidates all the time. (The smearing is done for free by the press instead) The only point at which I would say this was overreach was the period when Gerry Adams MP was banned from speaking on televion and had to have his words read by an actor. WRT Facebook, a good start would be to guarantee traceability of ads, plus the ability to see all ads run by a particular entity even if they're not targeted at you.
- hammock 9y ago
  You started to make an argument for how "regulate" doesn't mean "ban" but then immediately cited how Rx drug ads are banned.
  - 18pfsmt 9y ago
    The part about ad campaign transparency was good though. Corporate facebook page data doesn't seem accessible at all. Is there an API for this data that I don't know about??
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Post I was replying to said (hyperbolically) "ban all communications".
  - Drakim 9y ago
    Well, technically we do things like ban outright lying in advertising already, but it's called regulation. Usually when people talk about "bans" they mean blanket bans for an entire industry, like, banning guns, banning fast food, banning drones, etc.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
Grieverheart 9y ago
I think the solution to most problems in the economy is to limit how big companies can get.
- quotemstr 9y ago
  Competition keeps organizations honest. It forces them to conform their beliefs to reality and discard whatever is incorrect or counterproductive. It's the only mechanism we've found in thousands of years of institutions that preserves the valuable correspondence between belief and truth. When an organization becomes big enough that its survival ceases to depend on the correspondence of belief with reality, other concerns take over: usually, primate-hierarchy status games. And these games escalate until the organization fails or people die, depending on the organization.
  - rootusrootus 9y ago
    Competition does not exist when companies get so large they own the whole market.
    - quotemstr 9y ago
      That's my point.
  - avip 9y ago
    Concerns s.a primate-hierarchy status games, antitrust laws, and so forth.
gt_ 9y ago
>Isn't this true of almost any industry which lets you put out information? E.g. news publishing? Book publishing? Blogs? Advertising is not information. If it were merely data being exchanged, we wouldn't call it advertising. Advertising is the part that changes one's mind. See: https://www.etymonline.com/word/advert https://www.etymonline.com/word/advert >I mean, what exactly would you do, ban all communications? Start by acknowledging the problem. Dodging it hasn't worked. Then we can learn more about it, how it works, the complications of it's side effects (like directly incentivizing privacy abuse) and come up with hopefully a sufficient and efficient solution. In short, we would do Problem Solving, very different from the other option of Not Trying.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  Because I'm familiar with HN's penchant for being black-and-white about things, I'll preface this with: I think advertising is very much a net loss for the world and would be pretty happy if it all disappeared tomorrow, magically ceterus paribus. I just don't think that it makes any sense to redefine a word instead of actually addressing a point you disagree with. Yea, and "villains" are just farmers (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=villain https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=villain) Come on man, there's no way that you don't know how dumb it is to pretend that the etymology of a word is more relevant than its modern definition. ' > Advertising is the part that changes one's mind. You can't just assert something insane like this without any attempt at backing it up. Advertising is 100% information being exchanged; it may be subjective, but the dirty secret that everyone ignores about epistemology is that all "knowledge" is socially-constructed. Thank God we've (generally) agreed on a few high-quality sources like the scientific establishment, but it's hopelessly naive to pretend that you can find the line where something ceases to be "real" information. And clear lines are incredibly important in legislation, particularly when there's a trillion dollars of incentive to find loopholes.
  - gt_ 9y ago
    I never redefined anything. I’m just trying to help you with the nuance in the language that you must be just willfully avoiding. Otherwise, you have found a rhetorical loophole. Doesn’t mean you are right. “Information” is a poor term for this discussion. “Data” draws the more useful distinction. I should have said “Advertising is not only information”. It would just be stubborn to insist that advertising is merely data sharing. I’ve been working in advertising most of my life and we do more data distortion than data sharing. We make a living on dishonesty and manipulation.
wpietri 9y ago
It is definitely not true for news and book publishing. For news, consider things like the Chinese wall [1] between news and ad sales, the formal ad standards that news organizations will have, and the fact that at least traditionally, humans manually sell those ads, resulting in oversight. For books, I'm not even sure what you mean. Book publishers sell books that they think will do well and, mostly, that reflect well on them. You can't just walk into Random House with a credit card and say, "Here's my manuscript, please put it in book stores nationwide." Personally, I'd just ban all advertising. The economic-theory reason we need it, purchasers discovering better ways to solve their needs, has been made mostly unnecessary by the Internet. Now if you want to buy a foo you just search for "foo reviews" and you're off to the races. We'd figure out other ways to fund things. As an aside, that justification was always a little... generous. Coca Cola doesn't spend billions per year on ads because they're just trying to reach people who've never heard of their products. They do it because they want to manipulate people into buying Coke. I say we can trust people to find unhealthy addictions all on their own. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Journalism
- andrepd 9y ago
  I think the same way. In the end, advertising creates harm to people. Put aside the numbers, and vacuous phrases like "creating value to the shareholders". The net impact on advertising is harm to people. It's about using tricks, potentially with very harmful side effects, to manipulate people into buying your stuff. Sometimes I imagine how a world without any type of commercial advertising would be...
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    >It's about using tricks, potentially with very harmful side effects, to manipulate people into buying your stuff. There is a lot of this, but that is not the whole of advertising. Ads can be informational and useful. Take the previews at a theater before the feature. Those are ads, they are paid for, and a lot of people like them. If you like movies you'd probably like to know what movies are coming, it's useful for you and useful for the studios. It's a positive sum game. >Sometimes I imagine how a world without any type of commercial advertising would be... There would be more of a concentration on other ways to get messaging out. If companies couldn't buy search engine advertisements they would concentrate more on SEO. It's not "advertising" but it has the same effects. There are plenty of side ways into achieving the same propaganda goals.
manigandham 9y ago
No, this isn't about banning all communications. Publishing requires you to earn an audience. You can start a blog today but you won't have millions of readers. In fact, audience size is often used as a proxy signal for authority and quality. Spend a few thousands on Facebook though (or other ad networks), and you can easily get in front of millions of people with whatever message you want, completely subverting all the usual signals. Many people can't discern authority very well, and that's if they even recognize that it is a paid ad. There must be more regulation. TV, radio, print involved considering time and effort which was a natural barrier, but digital is much too granular and fast for the same rules to apply, and we actually have even less governance.

by edanm 9y ago

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> what would you do? 1. Break up Facebook under anti-trust law. Social network share is as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, market share. 2. Pass an American GDPR. Consumers get an absolute right to audit and delete their data. Explicit consent is required for each instance of third-party sharing. Companies are liable to their users for breaches, with a minimum amount claimable through an easily-accessibly regulator.

hammock 9y ago
1) requires a doj investigation and high court ruling, not to mention your particular case "social media share" is without precedent
- jodrellblank 9y ago
  Time to set a precedent then.
- wpietri 9y ago
  Well, 1 could also be taken care of by Congress passing a new law. But I think the more interesting alternative is Zuck deciding to do it on his own. There's no reason he couldn't create a nonprofit and give it the "natural monopoly" pieces. That would certainly include identity and the social graph, and maybe a publishing interchange. Then Facebook could step back and compete on the non-monopoly pieces. The client, of course. But all the add-ons. Groups and events and marketplace and whatever else. Google, Twitter, Amazon, and probably Apple would probably quickly create their own social clients. And would also join some nonprofit advisory board, which would help to set protocols and standards.
wutbrodo 9y ago
Sure, but neither of those have anything to do with what this thread is talking about. Data ownership and privacy are important, but this thread is about GP's claim that (paraphrased) the fundamental problem is that advertising is the ability to buy influence at scale, and that "bad actors" aren't prevented from doing so.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > the fundamental problem is that advertising is the ability to buy influence at scale Breaking up Facebook reduces all those scaling factors.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying. I'm still not so sure it's true though. Is it materially different to go buy from 5 ad brokers instead of 1? Or from ad exchanges that automate it for your? It's hard for me to see how this would have much of an effect, beyond mildly increasing the cost.
734786710934 9y ago
What would breaking up Facebook look like? Most features of Facebook couldn't operate as standalone businesses without creating their own massive ad networks.
- coupdetaco 9y ago
  Facebook the company, not facebook the application.
- titanomachy 9y ago
  Instagram and WhatsApp worked fine before they were part of Facebook.
  - 734786710934 9y ago
    Both were being run off of VC money when Facebook acquired them. They would be in Snapchat's shoes right now if they were still independent.
  - wemdyjreichert 9y ago
    They are not the issue so much as FBs core business.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > What would breaking up Facebook look like? Crack it along its social graph(s) or separate the platform (which would become a regulated utility) from the advertising business. Mergers offer four broad categories of synergies [1]: demand-side, supply-side, political and administrative. Airline mergers are usually about demand-side synergies. Having more market share gives you better data about future trends. It also gives you pricing power. Media/telecom mergers tend to rely on supply-side synergies: prices won't be raised, but content suppliers can be squeezed for distribution. When Lockheed Martin bought Sikorsky it acquired lots of employees in Connecticut [2]; that bought them some bulldogs in the Congress. (Administrative synergies are mostly B.S.; they fall into the "you have an accounting department, we have an accounting department, combined we can have just one" category and were mostly disproven in the post-WWII conglomerate boom.) Facebook is a super aggregator [3]; it has both demand-side and supply-side monopolistic synergies. Cracking the demand side means users go to sleep with a Facebook account and wake up with a Facebook No. 3 account. (Or to sleep with an Instagram account and wake up with an Instagram account.) This worked for AT&T and could be done today (at significant expense to Facebook's shareholders as it was to Standard Oil's, AT&T's and Microsoft's). Cleaving social graphs is complicated. But we understand graph theory better today than we did in AT&T's days. Bonus: require an open inter-operability standard if these networks want to interconnect. Cracking the supply side would involve taking related advertisers and hiving them off into a separate advertising company. The Facebook platform left would be a natural monopoly, regulated like a utility, serving dual profit and public roles. (Messenger, Instagram, M, and other relatively-discrete products would similarly be spun off.) TL; DR The novelty of breaking up a Facebook is superficial and finds precedent in antitrust enforcement history. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/synergy.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/synergy.asp [2] http://www.courant.com/business/hc-sikorsky-connecticut-20160920-story.html http://www.courant.com/business/hc-sikorsky-connecticut-2016... [3] https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/ https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/
gesman 9y ago
This: "Pass an American GDPR."
wolfgke 9y ago
> 1. Break up Facebook under anti-trust law. Social network share is as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, market share. You should better ask why the mass of people registered on it to let this happen. It is not that privacy activists have not been warning all the time... To give a little background: In Germany (where there is a lot more concern for privacy) Facebook never got that deeply ingrained into the daily habits of most people. It is also not uncommon that at a social gathering people explicitly tell you that they don't desire that any photos that were taken here to be put on Facebook.
- wsy 9y ago
  > You should better ask why the mass of people registered on it to let this happen. Social networks gravitate towards oligopolies(+), because people go wherever everybody else is. Even in Germany, there is a social price to pay for not having a Facebook account. (+) Oligopolies, because there seems to be a age generation effect: children don't use the network where their parents are. This is one of the areas where self-regulation simply doesn't work.
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    > Even in Germany, there is a social price to pay for not having a Facebook account. I often write here at HN that there is no "objective" status in society, but rather status in various, often vaguely defined groups in the society, where the individual status symbols can even contradict each other. It is not my impression that all in all I had to pay a social price for not having a Facebook account at any time (quite the opposite). Rather in some groups this lead to a social malus, but in other groups it gave a large social bonus.
    - wsy 9y ago
      I fully agree that this highly depends on the groups to which you belong. Personally, I have not experienced a malus for not having a Facebook account, but I know of occurrences (e.g., a student learning group organizing their communication via Facebook). For myself, I have faced a potential social price for not having a WhatsApp account that was large enough to let me create an account.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pjc50 9y ago

People keep seeing "regulate" and reading it as "ban". The UK regulates what you can advertise (no prescription pharma, for example) and extremely limits political advertising and spending. This results in a culture where local volunteers are important and you don't get weird lie-based adverts smearing candidates all the time. (The smearing is done for free by the press instead) The only point at which I would say this was overreach was the period when Gerry Adams MP was banned from speaking on televion and had to have his words read by an actor. WRT Facebook, a good start would be to guarantee traceability of ads, plus the ability to see all ads run by a particular entity even if they're not targeted at you.

hammock 9y ago
You started to make an argument for how "regulate" doesn't mean "ban" but then immediately cited how Rx drug ads are banned.
- 18pfsmt 9y ago
  The part about ad campaign transparency was good though. Corporate facebook page data doesn't seem accessible at all. Is there an API for this data that I don't know about??
- pjc50 9y ago
  Post I was replying to said (hyperbolically) "ban all communications".
- Drakim 9y ago
  Well, technically we do things like ban outright lying in advertising already, but it's called regulation. Usually when people talk about "bans" they mean blanket bans for an entire industry, like, banning guns, banning fast food, banning drones, etc.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

Grieverheart 9y ago

I think the solution to most problems in the economy is to limit how big companies can get.

quotemstr 9y ago
Competition keeps organizations honest. It forces them to conform their beliefs to reality and discard whatever is incorrect or counterproductive. It's the only mechanism we've found in thousands of years of institutions that preserves the valuable correspondence between belief and truth. When an organization becomes big enough that its survival ceases to depend on the correspondence of belief with reality, other concerns take over: usually, primate-hierarchy status games. And these games escalate until the organization fails or people die, depending on the organization.
- rootusrootus 9y ago
  Competition does not exist when companies get so large they own the whole market.
  - quotemstr 9y ago
    That's my point.
- avip 9y ago
  Concerns s.a primate-hierarchy status games, antitrust laws, and so forth.

gt_ 9y ago

>Isn't this true of almost any industry which lets you put out information? E.g. news publishing? Book publishing? Blogs? Advertising is not information. If it were merely data being exchanged, we wouldn't call it advertising. Advertising is the part that changes one's mind. See: https://www.etymonline.com/word/advert https://www.etymonline.com/word/advert >I mean, what exactly would you do, ban all communications? Start by acknowledging the problem. Dodging it hasn't worked. Then we can learn more about it, how it works, the complications of it's side effects (like directly incentivizing privacy abuse) and come up with hopefully a sufficient and efficient solution. In short, we would do Problem Solving, very different from the other option of Not Trying.

wutbrodo 9y ago
Because I'm familiar with HN's penchant for being black-and-white about things, I'll preface this with: I think advertising is very much a net loss for the world and would be pretty happy if it all disappeared tomorrow, magically ceterus paribus. I just don't think that it makes any sense to redefine a word instead of actually addressing a point you disagree with. Yea, and "villains" are just farmers (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=villain https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=villain) Come on man, there's no way that you don't know how dumb it is to pretend that the etymology of a word is more relevant than its modern definition. ' > Advertising is the part that changes one's mind. You can't just assert something insane like this without any attempt at backing it up. Advertising is 100% information being exchanged; it may be subjective, but the dirty secret that everyone ignores about epistemology is that all "knowledge" is socially-constructed. Thank God we've (generally) agreed on a few high-quality sources like the scientific establishment, but it's hopelessly naive to pretend that you can find the line where something ceases to be "real" information. And clear lines are incredibly important in legislation, particularly when there's a trillion dollars of incentive to find loopholes.
- gt_ 9y ago
  I never redefined anything. I’m just trying to help you with the nuance in the language that you must be just willfully avoiding. Otherwise, you have found a rhetorical loophole. Doesn’t mean you are right. “Information” is a poor term for this discussion. “Data” draws the more useful distinction. I should have said “Advertising is not only information”. It would just be stubborn to insist that advertising is merely data sharing. I’ve been working in advertising most of my life and we do more data distortion than data sharing. We make a living on dishonesty and manipulation.

wpietri 9y ago

It is definitely not true for news and book publishing. For news, consider things like the Chinese wall [1] between news and ad sales, the formal ad standards that news organizations will have, and the fact that at least traditionally, humans manually sell those ads, resulting in oversight. For books, I'm not even sure what you mean. Book publishers sell books that they think will do well and, mostly, that reflect well on them. You can't just walk into Random House with a credit card and say, "Here's my manuscript, please put it in book stores nationwide." Personally, I'd just ban all advertising. The economic-theory reason we need it, purchasers discovering better ways to solve their needs, has been made mostly unnecessary by the Internet. Now if you want to buy a foo you just search for "foo reviews" and you're off to the races. We'd figure out other ways to fund things. As an aside, that justification was always a little... generous. Coca Cola doesn't spend billions per year on ads because they're just trying to reach people who've never heard of their products. They do it because they want to manipulate people into buying Coke. I say we can trust people to find unhealthy addictions all on their own. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Journalism

andrepd 9y ago
I think the same way. In the end, advertising creates harm to people. Put aside the numbers, and vacuous phrases like "creating value to the shareholders". The net impact on advertising is harm to people. It's about using tricks, potentially with very harmful side effects, to manipulate people into buying your stuff. Sometimes I imagine how a world without any type of commercial advertising would be...
- colechristensen 9y ago
  >It's about using tricks, potentially with very harmful side effects, to manipulate people into buying your stuff. There is a lot of this, but that is not the whole of advertising. Ads can be informational and useful. Take the previews at a theater before the feature. Those are ads, they are paid for, and a lot of people like them. If you like movies you'd probably like to know what movies are coming, it's useful for you and useful for the studios. It's a positive sum game. >Sometimes I imagine how a world without any type of commercial advertising would be... There would be more of a concentration on other ways to get messaging out. If companies couldn't buy search engine advertisements they would concentrate more on SEO. It's not "advertising" but it has the same effects. There are plenty of side ways into achieving the same propaganda goals.

manigandham 9y ago

No, this isn't about banning all communications. Publishing requires you to earn an audience. You can start a blog today but you won't have millions of readers. In fact, audience size is often used as a proxy signal for authority and quality. Spend a few thousands on Facebook though (or other ad networks), and you can easily get in front of millions of people with whatever message you want, completely subverting all the usual signals. Many people can't discern authority very well, and that's if they even recognize that it is a paid ad. There must be more regulation. TV, radio, print involved considering time and effort which was a natural barrier, but digital is much too granular and fast for the same rules to apply, and we actually have even less governance.