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Do grocery stores “capitalize on vulnerability” when they place name-brand products at eye level? Do carmakers “capitalize on vulnerability” when they advertis

• LeroyRaz 3y ago
  There are a great number of regulations placed on products (and their advertising) to ensure customers are informed and protected. Examples: Drinking disclaimers (drink responsibly). Cigarette disclaimers and off putting mandated packet visuals. The traffic light system in the UK (which displays a colour coded breakdown warning of unhealthy food macros on the front of all ready meals). Alcoholic beverages by law having to specify their alcohol percentages. Foods by law having to specify their nutritional content and ingredients. All of these regulations have been introduced to ensure customers are not blind to unhealthy choices (e.g., the traffic light system warning against high sugar content designed to make cheap addictive food). While not always effective, I believe that on balance these regulations make society a better place to live in. Similarly one could envision mandated social media disclaimers and warnings, and to regulate this way would be entirely within the wider norm, rather than something unusual.
• JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > At some point people need to be responsible for their own decisions This is like saying “everything in moderation” in a discussion about nutrition. No shit. We’re trying to find that delineation.
• quacked 3y ago
  Yes, yes, and yes. However, the three situations you named are targeting adults. Children and teenagers are worth insulating from the full might of advertisers, propagandists, and always-on virtual social circles.
  • bdzr 3y ago
    Ironically, many cereals are placed at eye level of children.
  • alakin 3y ago
    Are children and young adults banned from selecting products based on marketing inside stores?
    • Teever 3y ago
      Canada has forbidden the sale of cigarettes in grocery stores, and they've banned the display of any advertising for them in the stores that are still allowed to sell them.
      • Manuel_D 3y ago
        Sure, because cigarettes have clear and unambiguous harms to health. What makes advertising, I dunno, a remote controlled plane to a kid so much more unethical than advertising it to an adult?
        • quacked 3y ago
          You know, children's advertising in the 1980s and 1990s was heavily researched by psychologists and economists with the explicit goal of manipulating the emotional state of children to get them to bother their parents for toy purchases. I don't have any books or articles off the top of my head, but I've read several articles and analyses of how the pacing, pitch, and coloring of advertisements intended for children were designed to be as stimulating and upsetting as possible. There was also research put into when during the day and year you could play these commercials to the greatest effect, and the advertising slots at certain times were priced higher in response to this. It is possible that this doesn't harm children. However, the deliberate injection of emotional manipulation and disunity into families with young children in order to stimulate the purchase of toys doesn't strike me as particularly good for the nation, and I don't know that I would have to think very hard about my decision if given the option to prevent it using the law.
• BizarreByte 3y ago
  > At some point people need to be responsible for their own decisions. You're asking this of a group that largely can't vote, sign contracts, and which America doesn't trust to drink. I can get worked up about Meta targeting children in ways which they don't have the experience, or knowledge to know about let alone to avoid. Children should be protected from bad actors like Meta and let me be clear, any company taking advantage of kids is a bad actor.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • richardwhiuk 3y ago
    Companies take advantage of kids all the time - there's a huge history of this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_to_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_to_children The entire toy unboxing industry is built around advertising to children.
• AlexandrB 3y ago
  Yes to all of the above? Advertising is a nasty industry and should be tightly controlled.
• maximinus_thrax 3y ago
  > At some point people need to be responsible for their own decisions. We already do that. When they turn 18, we expect people to be responsible for their own decisions.
  • hotnfresh 3y ago
    One normal human with 24 hours in a day losing 45ish hours a week to pull median income and another 8ish per day to sleep versus multibillion dollar companies hiring behavioral psychologists and marketing experts with collectively many thousands of hours per day spent finding ways to trick people—and their efforts demonstrably work. The advertising industry’s a rabid dog the size of Godzilla and should be put down, whether it’s targeting kids or adults.
• switchbak 3y ago
  Do grocery stores “capitalize on vulnerability” when they ... place junk food at the checkout line to capitalize on your impulsiveness when you're least able to defend against it? Yes. You can be expected to make responsible decisions as an adult. That doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors trying to take advantage of you, and that this behaviour isn't borderline unethical.
  • ff317 3y ago
    I should make responsible decisions as an adult, but it's still fair to call that grocery store's actions unethical, and that maybe they should be regulated if they can't be ethical on their own.
    • lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Can you define exactly what is unethical about displaying candy in the checkout line? Should nothing be there? Only healthy vegetables? Is it unethical to sell things with added sugar in the first place? Or a certain amount of sugar per volume period?
      • ff317 3y ago
        The whole sugar/candy industry is unethical in my mind. It may take some decades for society to catch up, but eventually eating sugar the way we do today will be seen like smoking and the tobacco industry.
        • lotsofpulp 3y ago
          Why not extend this to basically everything not essential to life? Traveling to tropical destinations is clearly harmful for the world, living in big homes spaced out from each other is another one that causes unnecessary pollution. Selling alcohol, foods high in saturated fat (butter), etc.
      • kelseyfrog 3y ago
        Using people as a means to an end qualifies here and is generally considered unethical.
• stillwithit 3y ago
  [flagged]
• aaroninsf 3y ago
  At some point, we as a society are going to have to seriously engage the fact that we are now fully capable of manufacturing addiction, and at the moment, do so, both in adults and in children. "Their own decisions" is not a stable concept. Setting aside esoteric philosophy of mind, you need look no further than your own relationship to your phone—tested out for many of us at the Thanksgiving table last week, as duly noted by Chris Ware's cover of last week's New Yorker magazine—to confirm this. The mechanisms of surveillance captialism and a foundation of decades of consumer psychology (etc ad nausuem) have quite literally left us adrift in a world of stochastic mind control. At that same table many of us encountered the inexplicable world views of relatives whose propoganda bubbles did not intersect our own. And we all have such bubbles, not least as a result of the cheerful professionalism of many who browse here. Your decisions, just like teenagers' decisions, are not "your own" in the sense someone might have meant c. 1923. And before one cries, it has ever been thus, to that I say: no, it absolutely has not. The technologies for behavioral steering of today are as unalike what people contended with in advertising (etc.) a hundred years ago, as our logistic transport and energy industries are, amongst others. Until we take this on, head on, as a society, the problem will just get worse.
• skeaker 3y ago
  Yes, yes, and yes. Advertising is almost always malicious. The days of it being primarily small businesses getting the word out about themselves are long over. Advertising firms now have actual psychologists that study ways to best exploit the brain of the common man, and that is wrong.
  • kibwen 3y ago
    Hear hear. It's bizarre to see people like the parent commenter who are so unthinkingly accustomed to abusive and manipulative advertisements that they mistake its perversity for normalcy.
    • rightbyte 3y ago
      When I grew up in the 90s you kinda wanted ads. Otherwise you wouldn't know what was being shown at the theaters etc. People put up "No ads but Cineama ads and the phone catalogue" on their mailboxes etc. I believe many peoples perception of the world does not change from their childhood. At least very slowly. Ads stopped being useful about 20 years ago by now and like 10 (?) years ago they started to spy on us.
• Kapura 3y ago
  >At some point people need to be responsible for their own decisions. That point should come when they are no longer children. Targeting children to produce perfect little ecosystem consumers is... kinda evil.
• Levitz 3y ago
  >And I can’t get that worked up about Meta’s free product. There is no "Free" product. You are paying with freedom, you are paying with attention, you are paying with privacy. It's not "free", it's extracting value from you. It doesn't cost money, yes, but neither does working, yet we assume that transfer of value is such that it ought to be paid for. It's not Meta offering a "free" product. It's their users. Their users give Meta their data for "free", which then Meta uses for profit.
• marcosdumay 3y ago
  Not only I'll add to the choir of people answering "yes" to all those 3, but if any of those act in a way capable of redefining the reality people live in, they should be outlawed. Even if they are targeting adults. Marketing gets a lot of freedom because of the assumption that they only take over a small part of the information a person has access to. To the extent that this assumption becomes incorrect, those actions become attacks.