* Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.
In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it!
* Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
* Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
* Banning billboards or other public advertising? Fine. Not new. Done all over the place for commonsensical reasons.
* Any article that talks about "blurry, “out-of-focus fascism”—that sense of discomfort that you feel but can't quite point out" is itself blurry and out-of focus, not to say absurd and hyperbolic. Calling a mild sense of psychological discomfort "fascism" is just embarrassing.
Any existing policy inevitably has a gray area, no matter how elaborate it is. That's okay if the author didn't cover corner cases in a short essay.
> You don't just magically know what to buy.
Knowing what you need is not magic. I don't remember much advertising lately that would tell me how a good can satisfy my existing needs. Mostly, they are trying to make me feel I need something I didn't need before
> Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy.
We don’t need marketing, we need information. Objective information, that would be easier to come by in the absence of manipulative marketing.
Joolz strollers with ergonomic design, manoeuvrability, compactness, and storage space. compare and choose your favourite Joolz pushchair model.
Is this manipulation or information?
Knowing what you need is not magic, but knowing which products might satisfy it is not automatic. Advertising targeting, which people quite reasonably find intrusive, exists because advertisers desperately want to find people who may potentially want to buy their product.
Why should advertisement be different?
Knowing what you need is easy. Knowing what you might want is far harder.
It's relatively easy and sensible to ban very specific forms of paying for influence. But a ban on publishing your opinion in someone else's publication is extremely broad and obviously in violation of free speech. Free speech isn't defined as standing on a corner yelling at people.
I also think it's counterproductive. All influence seeking (both commercial and political) would be forced to move from overt advertising to covert infiltration of our communication.
I want more transparency, not less.
Would not search + first party description solve that? It’s easy to create a page “you have problem A? Try our product B”.
Looks like manipulation. Information would be a sheet of parameters relevant to the product. The cheapest and most expensive strollers can be claimed to be "Compact" and "Ergonomic".
Who would maintain such information repositories and what would the incentive be to take that on? (As they no longer could be supported by ad revenue.)
A-Are you Don Draper by any chance?
Seriously, though: you don't need marketing. What you need while searching for what product to buy is a technical specification of the product by which you can determine if the product suits your needs.
the irony is the author is using propaganda to spread populist ideas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_soluti...
I keep thinking about this, and the only conclusion I can come to is that businesses would still need to be able to advertise their own products in places that they own.
For example, what if I want to buy a guitar?
I'm shopping online. First, I need to pick a company to purchase my guitar from. How do I choose? Any sort of aggregated comparison of places to purchase from can be considered advertising, so they are all banned (otherwise, astroturfing would be only form of advertising). Do search engines also count as advertising? Okay, so I've found a site. How do I know I'm getting a good deal? (although this is a whole different argument about us worried about getting a good deal because maybe we over-consume, it's still a consideration).
Now, on that site, is this company allowed to advertise different brands that they carry to me? By definition of advertising, no - the whole purpose of showing me products is to make me purchase, which is the definition. So then do we reach a true communist state where there is only one option to purchase? If so, can I still not see it because it's considered advertising? Okay, fine, I need to be able to see at least one guitar, we can concede that point.
Or maybe instead I go to the store to purchase a guitar. Firstly, how do I find the store? If they are not allowed to advertise, must I organically drive past their store? Are there rules on business signs that disallow specifying the type of store, because that could be construed as advertising products? Or is that limited to a certain brand - the goal is to allow all competition equally, so it just says "guitar store"? We've already agreed (probably) that this store can't 'advertise' itself elsewhere, so the only way I will know about it is through (illegal) word-of-mouth, which is still technically advertising. Or maybe it's only illegal for businesses to advertise? Or for people who are earning money from the act? How is that defined?
Okay, anyway, I've made it to the store. When I walk in, I'm met with the same dilemma in example one - the store isn't allowed to hang up products, because that incentivizes me to purchase. Maybe I need to just say "hey, show me a guitar so I can try it" and they must present me with a randomly selected guitar to avoid bias. We continue this until I find one that resonates with me. They can tell me the price of each, but not a sale price, as that falls under unfair advertising law to incentivize me to purchase a specific brand, so brands aren't allowed to run sales anymore. I have no idea if I'm getting what I want - sure, it sounds great and feels great and I enjoy it, but maybe I could have gotten that from a less expensive guitar, or maybe I didn't realize that I wanted a different size guitar.
By this point, economies of scale have collapsed because every purchase must be organic and therefore every national retailer has been dissolved - and most likely the largest manufacturers have discovered the best way to exploit this situation, so the largest now have natural monopolies and the rest have died off because they couldn't compete and were selling direct to consumer, not stocked in stores. Speaking of which, how do stores even work? How do grocery stores work? Every grocery store is built from the ground up on advertising. The same logic applies here. Two choices on a shelf must be in identical nondescript boxes with absolutely no calls to action or differentiators listed. Therefore, the smaller companies go out of business, or maybe the companies with the largest or smallest packages. In fact, just the size of an item can be used to intuit value, so now prices must be fixed to size, and sales & coupons are outlawed.
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All this to say, marketing in some form has existed since time immemorial. Finding value in choices is human nature.
The only way something like this could happen ("Advertising is illegal") would be a monumental wide-scale, best-effort, not-perfect set of judgement calls, which would require drastic overreach by a governing body - which would be exploited by finding weak links in the system and exchanging something they value to look the other way for a certain seller - which is exactly what got us to where we are.
One of the main reasons that we always arrive right back where we started is because the people with (less empathy, win-at-all-costs, better-than-thou, etc.) mentalities are willing and able to exploit the other group, the group that wants (peace, fairness, equity, teamwork), because the second set of values means enabling those around you, and the first set of values means taking advantage of that.
The only way I ever see healthy systems working is in relatively small groups of people where there can be shared accountability and swift action taken towards selfish behaviors, as defined as a community. Unless there is near-total buy-in, a system cannot thrive with the assurance of fairness, teamwork, equity.
Corporations don't have rights. Corporations don't have the right to free speech.
Yes, I'm aware of the SCOTUS opinion on this issue--I'm saying SCOTUS is wrong on this.
And no, granting corporations personhood isn't a viable approximation. We're discussing a case in this thread where granting corporations a right is drastically different from granting individuals rights.
> Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
Your criticism is basically that OP didn't draft a full detailed legislation in a blog post. That's not how ideas get proposed on the internet and you know that.
> Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
I agree that people don't magically know what to buy, but ads make that problem worse, not better. Ads cannot inform, because they don't come from an unbiased source and even in the rare cases where they tell the truth, they're leaving out important facts intentionally. You're basically saying, "People don't know what the truth is, so we need to let liars lie to them." The solution to lack of knowledge is truth, not lies.
In the absence of advertising, independent third party reviews such as those provided by Consumer Reports would actually fill the need for consumer information.
This is where your confusion stems from, I think. Any sort of independent third-party review site is totally not advertising as far as I'm concerned. The problem with sites like Yelp is that they accept money from companies and are susceptible to astroturfing. But truly independent reviewers like Consumer Reports, are pretty clear not advertising.
> Now, on that site, is this company allowed to advertise different brands that they carry to me? By definition of advertising, no - the whole purpose of showing me products is to make me purchase, which is the definition. So then do we reach a true communist state where there is only one option to purchase? If so, can I still not see it because it's considered advertising? Okay, fine, I need to be able to see at least one guitar, we can concede that point.
This seems like handwringing about the most extreme possible form of legislation possible which nobody is proposing. I am not sure what definition of "advertising" you're thinking of, but having a list of what products your store sells isn't advertising by any reasonable definition.
I'm not against monetizing advertisement for the 1st use case either.
Personally, I can imagine a world without ads because I block them everywhere I can, and somehow I still manage to buy things, even if they might not be making me feel as cool as I should if I'd only play along.
How is that not advertising?
I hate all the comments being so coy about definitions. Ublock seems to block ads pretty well. Maybe start there and not these crazy hypotheticals where anyone saying anything about a product is banned
It's worse than that in that it's just plainly wrong. I learn about useful products via advertising all the time -- so often, in fact, that I'm sort of bewildered that anybody could claim otherwise. We must be experiencing the world quite differently.
Some limits exist on advertising exist in most countries. Do they respect free speech?
> * Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
Absolutely zero thought is never given on policing boundaries on anything. That's not how the legal system operates. All laws are approximations at best and grey areas get decided by courts on a case-by-case basis.
> * Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year
Free speech has a couple dozen exceptions like libel, incitement to violence, etc. And besides, it's not clear how it applies to corporations.
"Free" gifts for influencers typically need to be disclosed. Otherwise it's just payola.
Arguments like "policing the boundaries" can be applied to a lot of existing laws, so it's not particularly useful.
> In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
What information are you getting from a clip of a polar bear drinking a coke?
This is interesting. Alcohol companies a well known to bypass this prohibition by all possible means (product placement, influencers,...) and yet I find real benefits in it. It would possibly be similar if advertising was forbidden for everything
Start by banning target advertisements - now ad platforms can’t use information about the user to decide which ad to show.
Next, ban forced advertisement - people cannot be forced to watch 10 seconds of an ad, or to have the ad be persistent on a page. All ads can be easily dismissed.
Then, force ad platforms to respect a user setting that says they don’t want to see ads. Just a new browser standard that communicates the user preference, or a toggle that can be changed in apps.
That alone should get rid of most problematic ads, but we’d still have sponsors and affiliate links. For those, we can start by increasing the requirements for disclaimers or identification. e.g. sponsored content has to be strictly separated from non-sponsored content. Get rid of “segways” and affiliate links close to the actual content.
If advertisers find loopholes or ways around these measures, we just close the holes with new regulation.
That surely depends heavily on your definition of functioning democracy.
Can you still advertise smoking in the US?
Still, I believe we are better off like this than if those ads were allowed everywhere.