8 ms·

We don't need to go into absurd discussions in order to prevent 99% of the harm that comes from modern advertising. The line is clear: is money being exchanged

• OmarShehata 2y ago
  > The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Even worse: sometimes a genuine opinion becomes an incentivized one later on as someone's audience grows the good news is there is a solution that doesn't require playing these cat & mouse games and top down authority deciding what is allowed speech: you want better ways to reach the people who want your product. Ads are a bad solution to a genuine problem in society. They will persist as long as the problem exists. People who sell things need ways to find buyers. Solve the root problem of discernment rather than punishing everyone indiscriminately
  • pishpash 2y ago
    Yellow books used to do that. Because you're right it's a matchmatching problem.
  • imiric 2y ago
    > People who sell things need ways to find buyers. No, you've got that backwards. People who sell things should have a way of announcing their product to the world. Buyers who are interested in that type of product should be the ones seeking out the companies, not the other way around. The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today. Companies will cheat, lie, and break every law in existence in order to make more money. Laws need to be made in order for companies to stop abusing people. You know what worked well? Product catalogs. Companies buy ad space in specific print or digital media. Consumers can consult that media whenever they want to purchase a specific product. This is what ecommerce sites should be. Give the consumer the tools to search for specific product types, brands, specifications, etc.; get rid of fake reviews and only show honest reviews from verified purchases and vetted reviewers, and there you go. Consumers can discover products, and companies can advertise. This, of course, is only wishful thinking, since companies would rather continue to lie, cheat, and steal, as that's how the big bucks are made. I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff, and by propaganda from agencies that want to make us think or act a certain way. Like holy shit, people, is this really the best we can do? It's exhausting having to constantly fight against being manipulated or exploited.
    • beambot 2y ago
      Product catalogs are advertising... The Sears catalog was full of products made by other companies, and Sears paid a ton of money to get those catalogs to as many people as possible
      • PebblesRox 2y ago
        I think the point is that they're opt-in advertising. You didn't pick up a book and find pages from the Sears catalog interspersed with the pages you were trying to read. You picked up the Sears catalog when you were considering a purchase and wanted to see what was available.
        • beambot 2y ago
          When you visit a ad-supported news website, you're opting in too... No one is forcing you to use that website versus it's ad-free subscription alternatives, it's just that most people have decided they'd prefer the former
          • wat10000 2y ago
            The difference is that a catalog is advertising that the viewer actually wants to see. Ads on a news site are ads that the viewer merely tolerates because they go with the thing they want to see.
        • what 2y ago
          I get various catalogs/flyers/etc interspersed with my physical mail. They just send it to me, I never opted in.
          • aezart 2y ago
            Bulk mail should be banned, yeah.
      • exac 2y ago
        I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is that the catalog is "pull" in the sense that if you decide to keep your catalog, the advertising is inside the catalog, and you have to physically retrieve your catalog and open it to find what you're looking for (when you're looking for it), instead of the "push" method of running advertisements in every news article and on every bus.
  • addicted 2y ago
    > No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control. > nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem. Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.
    • YetAnotherNick 2y ago
      > People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Similar thing happened with Amazon recently. They copied bestsellers and promoted their own products in their store leading to death of other companies. Now you are just making this loop in steroids. All the small companies would be forced to be sold to companies with eyeballs like Meta and Google.
  • irrational 2y ago
    > No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels Isn’t it? You receive money when people buy your product because of your advertising.
  • programjames 2y ago
    > No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. But this is not the vast majority of 'advertising' or where advertising causes so much harm. A single individual has much less power to manipulate a single other individual, let alone thousands of other individuals. It takes millions of dollars to hire people with specialized marketing skills to do that.
• pishpash 2y ago
  Why not just eliminate the sale of personal data? That seems pretty cut and dry.
  • Rygian 2y ago
    That's only part of the problem.
  • neuralRiot 2y ago
    I feel like all the “targeted audience” stuff is used more to sell ad space and get its metrics rather than actually “targeting” ads.
  • autoexec 2y ago
    I'd happily support that but the harms of advertising go beyond the problems of surveillance capitalism so heavily restricting ads seems like a good idea on its own.
  • ulrikrasmussen 2y ago
    Simply make it illegal to base the choice of what ad to show on any data derived from the person accessing the content. The same content accessed by different people from different locations should have the same ad probability distribution. You can still do old-school targeting by associating static content with certain types of ad a priori, as long as the shown content is independent of the user and not generated from any user data.
• econ40432 2y ago
  Does CNN, Fox News, ABC, New York Times and CBS use money to endorse candidates on air? Is that advertising?
  • ericjmorey 2y ago
    Who would think it's not advertising?
    • econ40432 2y ago
      So these news networks would be banned too?
      • Ukv 2y ago
        The networks themselves wouldn't be banned, but they wouldn't be permitted to endorse or give airtime to a candidate in exchange for money, I'd assume is the idea.
        • econ40432 2y ago
          They're not endorsing candidates in exchange for money. They do use their money to run their networks, which they use to promote certain candidates and positions. Re: "The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising."
          • Henchman21 2y ago
            They’re endorsing candidates to sell more newspapers or more airtime for advertisers. How is that not “in exchange for money”?
            • theamk 2y ago
              What if they are running the story on local ocean tides or soup kitchens? They are doing this to sell more newspapers or more airtime for advertisers.. does this mean there is an "exchange for money" under your rule?
• FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  Most advertising is done via "influencers," now...
• tptacek 2y ago
  Commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment.
  • sethammons 2y ago
    Should it be?
    • worik 2y ago
      No. The purpose of "free speech" is to allow the spread of ideas. The purpose of advertising is to spread an idea. They are different things.
      • tptacek 2y ago
        I mean, if you're going to make up your own First Amendment jurisprudence. But it would be worth reading the line of cases from Schneider through Sorrell (there's a lot of them) to get the reasoning of several generations of jurists on why it's not this simple.
      • eddythompson80 2y ago
        What? Yes, the purpose of "free speech" is to allow the spread of ideas. The purpose of any particular piece of speech (a book, a pamphlet, a poster, a sign, a rally, a concert, anything) is to spread an idea. The idea in that particular piece of speech. Do you want to preserve free speech but ban speech that tries to spread an idea? Your comment would be banned because you're trying to spread that idea. Commercial speech is a legal term for speech that promotes commerce [1]. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commercial_speech https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commercial_speech
  • dahart 2y ago
    Commercial speech is also widely recognized to have lesser First Amendment protection than personal, political, or ideological speech, and there are cases of advertisers losing in court, c.f. Spann v J.C. Penney, as well as decisions that explicitly limit the First Amendment protections of commercial speech. Trying to ban all advertising of course wouldn’t get anywhere (especially under the current SCOTUS), and the article’s author clearly hasn’t really thought through the implications. But there is a legal door that is ajar, in the Central Hudson test, and could potentially be widened by arguing that some classes of today’s advertising are against the public interest; the First Amendment is already not blanket covering all commercial speech.
• worik 2y ago
  > The line is clear It is not. It never is. But that is not a big problem. Around the boundary cases there will be injustice and strife. But only around the boundary cases. We deal with this all the time in our societies. Some societies are better at it than others "The perfect is an enemy of the good"
• numpad0 2y ago
  I'm wondering if it's possible that the reality might be working the other way around than perceived. Could there be steaming can of worms that modern rampant commercial advertising is venting and holding down? Studio Ghibli made ~$220m on Spirited Away. What if they made $2.2T, is the quality going to go up, or down? And, would there be less ads, if no one made even $2.2 on them?
  • card_zero 2y ago
    You're presenting an idea here by means of a lot of implicit leaps, and I don't even know where I'm supposed to leap to at each stage. It's like a logic game that I'm failing at. What's the connection between adverts and the amount of money Ghibli made on their best-loved movie? Hmm, maybe none, maybe you're using Ghibli as a metaphor for products that make money through adverts. And maybe the implied answer to the next question is that their next movie, The Cat Returns, would have been higher quality if they had made even more money on Spirited Away. So what you could be saying is that crippling the ad industry would lead to lower quality products, without even much reducing the number of (less effective) adverts that get made. That's one way to read what you said, but I feel like I got it wrong.
    • numpad0 2y ago
      No, I'm saying what I had said in the first paragraph of my comment. I'm saying, the reward might not be the fuel, but it could be fire retardant, and you might not want to cut it off. People getting paid to do things do worse than otherwise[1]. They do better when not paid. The quality of work often gets worse when they get more. It's well established. As counterintuitive as sometimes it seem to be. What I'm essentially saying is, if you think people are right now getting paid to do something bad to the society(e.g. ads), you might want to keep them hooked and tied to the money and not to something else, like advertising for its own sake. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
      • card_zero 2y ago
        Oh! OK, so: Fear the work of unpaid ad execs! They won't stop making adverts, it's what they live for, money or no money! The adverts will continue to be made, but now they will be made for love, and they will be extremely high quality! And if you think ordinary adverts are bad, wait until you see what adverts are like when they come from the heart!
• timewizard 2y ago
  > The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. Let's say I have a journal. It costs money to subscribe. It covers a topic that many college students also study. Can I give the school a free copy? Can I give the teachers one? Can I give the students one? Is this advertising? When does the amount of "value" become offensive? > surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether. This is why this has become a modern problem. I can live with erring on the side of free speech when it comes to advertising, but there is no side to err on when it comes to analytics and targeting.
  • tptacek 2y ago
    The line doesn't matter, because advertising is protected by the First Amendment.
    • Vilian 2y ago
      It's not because USA constitution is bad that it can't be applied to any other country
    • snackbroken 2y ago
      So is fraud, libel, extortion, sexual harassment, impersonating a police officer, perjury, incitement, performing a stage play without a license from the writer, etc. but this hasn't stopped congress from passing laws to abridge the freedom of these particular kinds of speech. It's quite clear that the "freedom of speech" referenced in the 1st amendment pertains to expressing one's own sentiment, and that this is not the same as expressing something one is paid to express. The mental gymnastics necessary to convince oneself that spending money is protected speech are likewise ridiculous.
      • tptacek 2y ago
        Legislatures have tried to pass laws regulating commercial speech in various ways and the track record is generally that they get their asses handed to them by the court, because this is basically the most protected right in our system. It's fine if everyone here wants to fantasize about some alternative system, but "we make advertising illegal" is not something that can happen in our system of governance.
• crazygringo 2y ago
  > The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. The line is absolutely not clear. Is ABC allowed to run commercials for its own shows? ABC is owned by Disney. Is ABC allowed to run commercials for Disney shows? Is it allowed to run commericals for Disney toys? Can ABC run commercials for Bounty paper towels, in exchange for Bounty putting ads for ABC shows on its paper towel packaging? Literally no money is being exchanged so far. I'm familiar with a lot of gray areas that courts regularly have to decide on. But trying to distinguish advertising from free speech sounds like the most difficult free speech question I've ever come across. People are allowed to express positive opinions about products, and even try to convince their friends, that's free speech. Trying to come up with a global definition of advertising that doesn't veer into censorship... I can't even imagine. Are you suddenly prevented from blogging about a water bottle you like, because you received a coupon for a future water bottle? Because if you use that coupon, it's effectively money exchanged. What if your blog says you wouldn't have bothered writing about the bottle, but you were so impressed with the coupon on top of everything else it got you to write? You can argue over any of these examples, but that's the point: you're arguing, because the line isn't clear.
  • kragen 2y ago
    > Is ABC allowed to run commercials for its own shows? Well, not if they pay employees to do it. Except that shows aren't products, they're services, so they'd be exempt from this proposal.
    • eddythompson80 2y ago
      > Except that shows aren't products, they're services, so they'd be exempt from this proposal. What does that mean? What's a service in this definition? Surely not in the normal definition of a "service", as in health care or tech? Like is a movie a service too? Or do you just mean something you get for free because it's a show on their own channel? What if you had to pay for shows ala carte?
      • kragen 2y ago
• kragen 2y ago
  Maybe you should post a proposal for a law that's a little more specific than "is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising." Then we can see if it is in fact possible to prevent 99%, or for that matter 50%, of the harm that comes from modern advertising, without outlawing other things. Let's consider toomim's three examples: "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together," giving out free samples, and putting a sign up on your business that says the business name. The first case seems like it would straightforwardly be illegal under your proposal if the waiter is an employee (or contractor) who gets paid by the restaurant, because the restaurant is exchanging money with the waiter in order to promote the rosé, which is a product. It would only be legal if the waiter were an unpaid volunteer or owned the restaurant. The second case seems like it would straightforwardly be illegal under your proposal if the business had to buy the free samples from somewhere, knowing that it would give some of them out as free samples, because then it's exchanging money with its supplier in order to promote its products (in some cases the same product, but in other cases the bananas and soft drinks next to the cash registers, which people are likely to buy if you can get them into the store). Also, if one of the business's employees (or a contractor) gave out the free samples, that would be exchanging money with the employee to promote a product. You'd only be in the clear if you're a sole proprietor or partnership who bought the products without intending to give them away, changed your mind later, and then gave them away yourself rather than paying an employee to do so. Putting up a sign on the business that says the business name is clearly promoting products, if the business sells products. Obviously the business can't pay a sign shop. If the business owner makes the sign herself, that might be legal, but not if she buys materials to make the sign from. She'd have to make the sign from materials unintentionally left over from legitimate non-advertising purchases, or which she obtained by non-purchase means, such as fishing them out of the garbage. However, she'd be in the clear if her business only sells services, not products. A large blanket loophole in the law as you proposed it is that it completely exempts barter. So you can still buy a promotional sign from the sign shop if you pay the sign shop with something other than money, such as microwave ovens. The sign shop can then freely sell the microwave ovens for money. In this form, it seems like your proposal would put at risk basically any purchase of goods by a product-selling business, except for barter, because there is a risk that those goods would be used for premeditated product promotion. Probably in practice businesses would keep using cash, which would give local authorities free rein to shut down any business they didn't like, while overlooking the criminal product-promotion conspiracies of their friends. So, do you want to propose some legal language that is somewhat more narrowly tailored? Because a discussion entirely based on "I know it when I see it" vibes is completely worthless; everyone's vibes are different.
• kodt 2y ago
  Well money must be exchanged to put up a sign outside of your business. Therefore it would be illegal.
  • theamk 2y ago
    exchanged with whom? If it's a small business, it's likely the owner puts the sign out themselves. Or is it money exchange with sign manufacturer? In this case are outdoor signs OK if owner personally made them?
    • thayne 2y ago
      Most likely you paid someone to make the sign, and someone else to put it up. Even if you made and installed the sign yourself, you paid for the materials.
      • theamk 2y ago
        I am thinking outside blackboard ones, where owners write message in chalk [0] - they don't pay anyone to write the words, nor do they pay anyone to "install" it (= take it out). I suppose the sign itself must be paid for... but many eateries are using the same signs for menus, so if owner re-purposed one of the menu signs, is there money involved? Or does owner have to dig in garbage bins to find the blackboard for free? What about writing messages straight on the wall? What about printing signs on the printer your own and taping them to the wall? Now, don't get me wrong, I think it would be an overall improvement if those professionally-made outdoor signs get replaced by artisanal handwritten (or at least handmade) ones, but I don't think that this is what the original idea was about. [0] https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/text-written-on-chalkboard-outside-cafe-516052993 https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/text-written-on-cha...
        • thayne 2y ago
          Even for a blackboard, what if it is a paid employee that writes on it? Is it required for the owner to write it themselves? For that matter, would it be prohibited for employees to promote any product in any way?
• shadowgovt 2y ago
  The definition in the second sentence would ban sponsorship of public television, among other things. I don't think that plan nets out to a positive.
• thayne 2y ago
  > The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. So that would exclude: - listing your house, or car in the classifieds - buying a sign for your business (ad discussed in other posts) - buying a garage sale sign - buying a for sale sign, or flyers for your house for sale - paying a realtor to sell your house - paying a reporter or professional reviewer to write a review. Even if they are paid by a newspaper/magazine/consumer report site, money exchanged hands for something that promotes a product. - distributing a catalog - paying a cloud provider or VPS provider or website hosting service to host a website that promotes your product Also, what exactly constitutes a "product"? Does a service count? If not, that is a pretty big loophole. What about a job position? Or someone looking for employment? And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists. Word of mouth isn't very effective if you don't have any customers to begin with. I would expect removing all advertising to have a chilling effect on innovation and new businesses. To be clear, I think the current advertising environment is terrible, and unhealthy, and needs to be fixed. But I think that removing all advertisement would have some negative ramifications, especially if the definition of an ad is too simplistic.
  • barnabee 2y ago
    Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising. Listing a house for sale on an agent’s website: not advertising. Promoting that listing or the agent on the home page of a local news site: advertising etc… Some cases will be harder, all are decidable. We are talking about law not code, so there’s no need for a perfect algorithm, the legal system is designed precisely to deal with these sorts of question.
    • thayne 2y ago
      > Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising. According to the definition given, if the intent is to "promote a product", and money changed hands it is. It also meets websters definition of advertising: > the action of calling something to the attention of the public especially by paid announcements
• tiborsaas 2y ago
  What if I "win" a BMW and I can't stop talking about it on social media?
• akoboldfrying 2y ago
  > is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? So if I paint my store front's sign myself, I'm good, but if I pay a signwriter to paint it, it's illegal? I guess I better become "friends" with a signwriter, so that they don't mind making a sign or two for me "for free". And so that I don't mind giving them a widget or two from my store sometime in the future.
• Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  > Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising. Except that it is, and it's why social media is so important for marketeers; the best kind of advertising is word-to-mouth, so generating discourse about products is big business. Anyway, without strict legislation and tight controls on social media / chat / RL, how would you know whether they would be getting paid or not? It's a legal and / or philosophical conundrum, not to mention even more of a legal whack-a-mole than it already is.