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Here in the UK, gambling and gambling advertising is legal. Gambling companies are licensed by the Gambling Commission and are required to follow a code of cond

Here in the UK, gambling and gambling advertising is legal. Gambling companies are licensed by the Gambling Commission and are required to follow a code of conduct with respect to social responsibility. If a gambling company sent sales representatives to Gambling Anonymous meetings to offer free bets to recovering addicts, there would rightly be a public outcry and that company would likely be penalised or stripped of their license. I can open an incognito tab right now, visit an online support forum for gambling addiction and almost immediately start seeing advertising for gambling; thanks to ad tracking algorithms, those advertisements will start following me around the internet. That behaviour isn't any less antisocial simply because it's automated and online. The idea that gambling companies should be allowed to specifically target gambling addicts is not a popular policy position, but it's the default behaviour of online advertising platforms. Personalisation and targeting algorithms are innately amoral; they only reflect the values of a company or a society if they are specifically engineered to do so. This isn't a binary argument between "the internet should be a lawless free-for-all" or "the internet should be regulated until it resembles network television". It is primarily an argument about corporate social responsibility - companies should not be insulated against the externalities of their business practices. We're never going to completely agree on how social media companies should behave and moderating content at scale is immensely challenging, but that doesn't give them a free pass to ignore the risks and negative effects of their platform.

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
Given the gambling example, should we be mad at the advertisers or at the forum for making money off of allowing such ads? If the Gambling Association made a bunch of posters about their new lotto and paid anyone who put them up in buildings, and the person running the Gambling Anonymous meeting came and picked up a few to put up during their meetings, do you blame the Gambling Association or the one who picked up the posters? Ads are currently such a nightmare because almost everyone making money off of them has chosen to go with services that handle everything instead of filtering their ads and hosting them locally because letting those services handle it all pays better. It allows for far more tracking and targeted ads, sometimes for better and sometimes for much worse.

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

Given the gambling example, should we be mad at the advertisers or at the forum for making money off of allowing such ads? If the Gambling Association made a bunch of posters about their new lotto and paid anyone who put them up in buildings, and the person running the Gambling Anonymous meeting came and picked up a few to put up during their meetings, do you blame the Gambling Association or the one who picked up the posters? Ads are currently such a nightmare because almost everyone making money off of them has chosen to go with services that handle everything instead of filtering their ads and hosting them locally because letting those services handle it all pays better. It allows for far more tracking and targeted ads, sometimes for better and sometimes for much worse.