> One can construct advertising which is harder to fault morally, but because its less effective its generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing

> One can construct advertising which is harder to fault morally, but because its less effective its generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum. I think there exists a solution, but it is a hard sell. Ads by themselves are not inherently immoral. On the contrary, paid promotions performed by the person who is doing the show are part of the show, and, if done in good faith by a well-known and trusted person, can be considered a credible endorsement of the products being promoted. A relevant and creative promotion will not be skipped over even when there is such choice. There are people who make mediocre/misleading/fraudulent/infected/immoral ads - this is one root of the evil, and the second root lies in creators willingly giving up part of the screen time to the content that they have no control over and that, realistically, no human other than the potentially-malicious advertisement author has approved for airing. You are right that good ads are generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum. So, it's bidding on ads that were not reviewed by relevant humans that's the problem. Idea of a solution: make creators that want to profit from ads watch these ads and approve the best ones for their audience. Don't run unapproved ads no matter how high they bid. The place where this fails is the extra amount of work shifted onto creators: it's too much work to watch let's say 50 ads that the algorithm thinks are relevant, in order to select the best 5, so that only they are rotated.