You had targeted advertising before the internet, it's simply less targeted and less granular, with more wastage. A quick example: if you wanted to reach healt

You had targeted advertising before the internet, it's simply less targeted and less granular, with more wastage. A quick example: if you wanted to reach health care works, or more precisely doctors, you'd advertising on magazines for health care professionals. Most of which were subscribed (name, birthday, profession, address, etc) - so you had already some data for some targeting. > in reality has been used for much worse, according to the article: proliferation of hateful and false content on social media & political manipulation, among others. This is where advertising is getting mixed with propaganda - those are very different things and the only cross section is that they are messages that use text, audio, images, video - in others words - they are distributed with audiovisual media. They have different legal obligations (depending on the country). What is lacking is regulation and fines for abuse of propaganda. The problem is that the sheer volume of content being produced is hard to regulate.