
The case for banning ads in social media - chanind
https://chanind.github.io/2019/10/29/ban-social-media-ads.html
======
spodek
Pictures of Sao Paolo before and after banning billboards leads me to support
this idea.

Some examples (with a couple bonus pictures of London removing billboards):
[https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-
secret...](https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-
paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban).

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I can't be the only one that finds the before images more attractive.

The before pictures look like a vibrant and alive city where things are
happening and commerce is being done. The after pictures look dull and dead.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" The before pictures look like a vibrant and alive city where things are
happening and commerce is being done."_

That's what you get when you have competent, professional painters,
typographers, photographers and designers deliberately trying to make their
work exciting and attractive.

Without the ads, all you see is drab, flatly painted buildings, which are not
nearly as exciting.

The feeling of excitement and aliveness does not require advertising, however.
Some towns and neighborhoods revitalized their run down buildings by hiring
artists to come and paint murals (which, to my eye look far better than
virtually any ad), or commissioning other artwork (such as sculptures).

But even if that's not done, I'd personally much rather see flatly-painted
buildings than advertising that's trying to manipulate me.

~~~
Mirioron
> _But even if that 's not done, I'd personally much rather see flatly-painted
> buildings than advertising that's trying to manipulate me._

You would feel right at home around a neighborhood of commie blocks. Those
look fine too if they were painted well and had decent art on them, but that
doesn't happen. Nobody wants to pay for that.

------
firefoxd
Social media banning ads is like a printed newspaper banning ads. The dollar
and some you pay for a copy is for the production of the paper and delivery
only. What pays for the journalists, the research and all are the ads. Why
would they remove the ads? [1]

Unfortunately the newspaper industry didn't have much of a say since
advertisers found a more lucrative venue online. Now they are shutting down.

But social media companies have a say. You can't tweet anywhere else but on
twitter. You can't post a rehashed picture with a motivational quote, and gain
thousands of likes, anywhere else but on the facebook networks.

Social media is not a public utility. I think they should have all their ads.

My suggestion is to follow the less dramatic path of teaching people how to
use the internet. I am serious. Most people don't even know they are on the
internet when they are on their phone.

[1]: [https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-
journalism](https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-journalism)

~~~
Koremat6666
>u can't tweet anywhere else but on twitter. You can't post a rehashed picture
with a motivational quote, and gain thousands of likes, anywhere else but on
the facebook networks.

there are plenty of products more than number of newspapers out there, if you
are not happy with these platforms you can start your own far to easily too.

Just the way newspapers are dying so will facebook, twitter, instagram and
many others. We only need for the next big thing to rise.

On that day people will lament how awesome was Facebook that helped
independent writers, journalists and influencers and how the new thing is
ruining the world.

~~~
FussyZeus
Except all of these things have the same critical flaw; they all depend on
advertisements to pay the bills. To get advertisers, they need engaged
audiences. To get engaged audiences, they need various social mechanics to
drive engagement to an artificially high rate than their service would
otherwise have. They also are then incentivized to police content in ways that
make the medium more appealing to advertisers. Then eventually people get sick
of it, and a new upstart shows up offering a better experience with less
advertising. And people move on, until the same factors cause the same cancers
to grow in the new one, which eventually cause it's own demise.

Ironically, by banning advertisement, you would eliminate one of the biggest
drivers of change in social networks that cause them to die. Not all of them,
of course, but one of the biggest by far. In a strange twist, you might well
save the social network from succumbing to the cancer it's leadership always
inflicts upon it.

The qualities that make a social network useful for the purpose of allowing
social networking are almost completely at odds with the qualities that make
it attractive to advertisers, almost to a comical degree:

* Privacy controls and default-enabled secure settings hide information from advertisers

* Securing people's social circles from advertisers reduces their ability to target

* Protecting people's photos from being co-opted for use in apps or scanned for auto-tagging reduces reach

* Policing outrageous, clickbait, or controversial content reduces the main clients social networks have for paid promotion

Basically, the ideal social network would either charge a base subscription
fee and provide an ad-free experience, or would be free, and be entirely
subsidized by the Government. I cannot envision a private company willing to
provide a user-centered experience that would be a net good for the userbase,
because everything the users want and need conflicts with what the network
would want to sell to advertisers.

~~~
Mirioron
A government run social network would probably come with so many strings
attached that it would never work. It wouldn't appeal to people because you
wouldn't be allowed to say or do most things. Even if draconian rules don't
exist at the start, they will quickly appear.

~~~
FussyZeus
Care to enumerate some of these strings? Or perhaps some of these things you
wouldn't be allowed to say?

Quite the contrary on the second point, with regard to a Government-run
website, you'd have a far stronger claim to the rights of free expression
people regularly (erroneously) attempt to claim on privately owned social
networks.

Or does your entire point begin and end with "government bad?"

------
meritt
> One could imagine going back to the old Whatsapp model of charging users $1
> per year

Facebook has around 2.45B monthly active users. On a global basis, they would
need to charge every user $28/yr to make the same annual revenue. I'm not sure
what studies to cite, but I think it's relatively safe to say they'd lose a
significant portion of their userbase if they started charging, and thus would
need to charge a whole lot more than $28/yr per user.

While I can appreciate the notion, there's a zero percent chance any large
social media platform like Facebook will ever ban ads.

~~~
nindwen
> there's a zero percent chance any social media platform such as Facebook
> would ever ban ads.

Yes, this is what the article says. This means we must force them to.

~~~
meritt
> This means we must force them to.

Advertising represents 98.5% of Facebook's revenue and you're proposing that
we (btw, who is "we"? They are a global company) tell them they can't run ads?
What exactly remains for the 43,000 employees and the 5% of the S&P500 market
cap that you just decided to eliminate?

~~~
cameronbrown
There's going to be far more economic repercussions if ads are yanked out of
the market. Believe it or not but they do drive a huge amount of small
business growth.

~~~
zanny
Advertising is zero sum. It doesn't create value, it just redistributes it.
And even worse it redistributes it through psychological manipulation. Modern
advertising is an arms race of capital to rob the poor of their time and money
through the most aggressive manipulation they can.

In the absence of abusive advertising people would not suddenly stop spending
money. They might even be more inclined to seek out new experiences without a
constant mental assault by the largest corporations with the deepest coffers
to bury them in their ads. Regardless of the way it goes, advertising is
_absolutely_ a net deficit to a small business - they don't have the capital
resources or scale to permeate culture the way large corporations can. And if
they are expending their limited resources trying to participate in the rat
race they are sacrificing value to their existing customers and shortchanging
their own growth for what is effectively an extortion of participation - if
everyone else is deluged in manipulation to rob them and you don't participate
there will be no money left over once the wallet has been rung dry by as many
emotional vectors as possible for them to find you.

~~~
zeroonetwothree
Advertising is “positive sum” overall. Actually almost all economic activity
is, that’s why our economy keeps growing.

And with ads the mechanism is really obvious—-it helps people identify
products that solve their problems.

~~~
pgcj_poster
In terms of utility, advertising is negative-sum, because it _misleads_ people
about solutions to their problems. An advertiser has an incentive to try to
get you to buy their product regardless of whether it's actually a good
solution to your problem. In fact, it seems like the less useful a product is,
the more it needs to be advertised. I've never in my life seen an ad for
bread, but I've seen lots of ads for scams, fad diet books, and breakfast
candy (sometimes called "cereal").

The economy growing is not necessarily a good thing. For instance, the economy
would get bigger if the government passed a law requiring everyone to buy mud
pies — a mud pie industry would spring up, employ lots of people, and add to
the country's GDP. But society wouldn't be better to live in for it, because
mud pies are useless. Likewise, the economy would be smaller if people didn't
constantly replace their clothes to keep up with the latest corporate-
engineered fashion, or if they stopped buying books like Rich Guy's System for
Making Guaranteed Free Money in Real Estate, but people would still be better
off if they did.

------
bloody-crow
I don't find those takes convincing mainly due to the fact that authors never
attempt to do a proper though experiment to test their own hypothesis.

Let's imagine for a second, that US and EU governments get together and for
real ban all ads on social networks.

The end-user product of Facebook & Twitter majority of users interact with on
a daily basis represent maybe ~20% of the tech that engineers are working on.
The rest is some crusty under-the-hood tech geared towards collecting user
information, selling/targeting ads, and rearranging your feed in a way that
maximizes time you spend on the site. If there's no ads, all this tech is
suddenly useless.

Facebook would immediately have to fire 80% of its staff. Its market value
would plummet. They'd have to implement subscription model, that majority of
users would immediately reject. Even if they accept a huge loss and allow
people to use the site for only $5/y, I imagine only 10-15% of currently
active users will accept it.

Now when maximising ads is not a priority, people start spending way less time
yelling at each other on social media. They need to spend this time some other
way.

I'm too lazy to think further, but it's clear that "just ban the ads" is a
HUUUGE change that will affect so many things at once, that it's almost
impossible to predict all effects it's gonna produce.

~~~
cameronbrown
> ~20% of the tech that engineers are working on

Citation needed. 20% of tech by what metric?

I'd say the majority of work at FB, by far, is plumbing, like at most tech
companies.

------
AmericanChopper
> While almost everyone can agree that something must be done

I’m not sure that’s true. There’s a very strong correlation between people who
think something must be done, and people who think they must be granted more
power to control the flow of information across the internet.

As long as communication has existed, communicating false or misleading
information has existed. The only way to combat it is with skepticism and
critical thought. Trying to ban it is impossible, and establishing an
authority to enforce the truth won’t decrease the amount of false or
misleading information communicated, it will only ensure that all false or
misleading information aligns with the views of the authority.

~~~
bloody-crow
> As long as communication has existed, communicating false or misleading
> information has existed

I don't think it's ever been at such level, though. The whole modern economy
incentivizes the amplification of false and polarizing information for the
sake of maximizing engagement.

> The only way to combat it is with skepticism and critical thought

It can only get you so far. You can see that even respectable sources are
slowly slipping into reporting unverified info and hot controversial takes for
the sake of clicks and ad revenue these days. If left alone, this trend will
produce a situation where there won't be any source you trust enough to cross-
check against.

~~~
AmericanChopper
> I don't think it's even been at such level

I haven't seen any evidence of that. Human beings communicate and consume
information much more than they have before, but where's the evidence that has
made the 'problem' worse? We're much less insular than we've ever been before,
so any increase in exposure to misleading information has been accompanied by
an increase in exposure to opposing view points.

> It can only get you so far

So can any pursuit of the truth. If you want to set the bar at discovering
universal truths, then you're going to be disappointed.

> this trend will produce a situation where there won't be any source you
> trust enough to cross-check against

Good. There should never be a single source that you trust to always tell you
the truth.

~~~
bloody-crow
> Good. There should never be a single source that you trust to always tell
> you the truth.

Society develops by relying on building trust and reputation. Information
coming from a trustworthy source with good reputation is generally more
valuable than information coming from someone who's known to be a liar.
Current trend shifts the values in a way, where more engaging information
produces more revenue. If you extrapolate it further, you get into a situation
where society is reduced the level of cavemen when there's no way to share
information because there's no trust and the only way to learn something is to
experience is first-hand.

~~~
AmericanChopper
I can’t see how this comment is substantiated. Personally I’ve always
considered large media corporations to be quite untrustworthy. Anecdotally
I’ve noticed that other people have been sharing that view more than before
(perhaps I’m wrong about that, but that’s the way it looks to me). But let’s
say less people trust Fox News or CNN less than they used to, how does that
harm society exactly? To me that sounds like people are treating information
with increased skepticism, and are likely consulting a more diverse set of
sources than they used to. If that’s true then those self-regulating
mechanisms of trust and reputation that you mentioned are in fact protecting
society from the outcome you described.

------
some_random
I don't agree with the idea that banning ads would lead social media networks
to become less addicting, which seems to be taken for granted. If twitter
charged $1 a month (which has to be far more than they make from ads served to
me), they are still incentivized to keep me on the site. Sure, they might not
make marginal dollars from my eyeballs, if I quit then they make nothing. Even
if it's a one time purchase, they still want me there to draw my friends
there.

~~~
asdff
At that point, you are paying for a tool. And you want your tool to be good.
The site design maximizes time on site by minimizing the rate of information
you can get. "Catching up" takes forever, compared to when most social media
websites were chronological.

If I'm paying, I want something that maximizes my productivity. Imagine if
adobe released an update that made something that took 2 steps into 7 steps,
just to make sure you are spending a larger % of your day screwing around in
Photoshop. There would be riots in the streets.

------
andrewljohnson
Gun companies can't advertise on Instagram, so they pay shills to do posts. In
a world where social media ads are overall illegal, you'll see wild
contortions to skirt the law.

~~~
Porthos9K
So what? We should ban all advertising, and then nuke corporations who flout
the ban or try to find a loophole.

And don't tell me advertising is free speech. As far as I'm concerned,
corporations are not people and have no rights. Like governments, a
corporation's powers are defined by law.

~~~
buboard
what about sole proprietors? or professionals? can the government advertise?
it is not people either

and how do i know you 're not paid for that comment?

~~~
buckminster
Corporations have a huge government-granted advantage - unlimited liability -
yet they still claim the privileges of personhood.

Simple rule: if you accept unlimited liability you get free speech. If you
don't you don't.

~~~
krapp
>Simple rule: if you accept unlimited liability you get free speech. If you
don't you don't.

I don't recall where in the US Constitution free speech is defined as only
being granted in proportion to legal liability. I only recall the part where
"Congress shall make no law (...) abridging freedom of speech."

I know some on HN hate advertising in all its forms but there's no way around
this - you can't make advertising illegal without also essentially making free
speech illegal. You can regulate advertising, of course, as you can regulate
speech with libel and slander laws, FDA labeling requirements, etc. But you
can't ban it outright. And you certainly can't have inalienable, natural
rights be contingent upon legal fictions.

------
throwaway8291
It's funny to imagine the year 2024. There are millions of small fake worlds
consisting of streams of events, videos, and conversations - a beautiful
algorithmic balancer will keep each of these quasi-communities humming,
guiding their participants through their day with lots of - engagement.

There's a weirdo movement of people, who are not following one of the 50000
synthetic celebrities, that live and breath and adored by many.

Content generation will be semi-automatic, at least. And ads and non-ads will
just merge more. The most targeted ad is one, that I do not even recognize.

I feel detached (not bad) today - I will feel alien (maybe bad) in ten years.

~~~
buboard
celebrity arises from the perceived superiority of those people to everyone
else. In an increasingly connected world, there are fewer celebritis, not
more, as the human brain has a limited capacity for meaningful social
connections.

------
makomk
Why just ads in social media? It seems like you could replace social media
with the mainstream media in this argument and it would make just as much
sense.

~~~
Nasrudith
Because they are an established part of the political machine and status quo.

------
not2b
You can't get rid of ads. But ads should be transparent and it should be
visible to all that X paid for an ad, sent it to Y group and said Z. That
would prevent politicians from, for example, advertising to people on one side
of an issue that he is on their side, and to people on the other side of an
issue that he is on their side, knowing that neither group will see the other
ad. Then they could keep people from doing new last-minute ads right before an
election so they can't sneak in whoppers before the honest press can catch
them.

------
JohnFen
Personally, I think it's more important to ban the tracking that ad companies
engage in.

~~~
OJFord
Absolutely. Tracking and data collection is the issue, ads qua ads are fine, I
don't think this was ever really a significant conversation in offline
advertising in newspapers and magazines in years gone by.

It's the tracking (online and offline) that's unpalatable.

------
walrus01
Here's a personal opinion that might be wildly unpopular with entities whose
revenue stream is primarily composed of advertising.

I work in network engineering for an ISP, which is a mid-sized regional ASN.

there is no reason why the internet needs to have advertising on it at all,
for people to both make use of it and pay for it as end-user residential
consumers, or businesses.

as an ISP that has both wholly-owned facilities-based last-mile services, and
that uses third-party last-mile services, these are entirely paid for by the
subscriber revenue.

Our revenue is also sufficient to pay for inter-city transport services, IP
Transit upstreams, various colocation costs, and all of the infrastructure
needed to connect to various IX points and content delivery networks.

Essentially, look at it as the same difference between Netflix, Amazon Prime,
or traditional advertising-supported cable television.

Residential end-user internet service is now just as essential as having
functioning water, sewer, or electrical grid connection. The monthly
subscriber fee per connection when aggregated between dozens of thousands of
individual endpoints, is more than sufficient to support a robust, redundant
ISP that can pay competitive salaries to its staff.

~~~
buboard
ISPs also pay wages which support the economy. There is a 500B industry which
subsidizes the web. If you remove it, the cost will be deducted from the wages
of everyone who works in tech. Also, this will lead to even more
centralization as ads are the only channel for still-small businesses to reach
critical mass.

~~~
walrus01
I have very little objection to seeing targeted, specific ads in certain
places. For example if I'm browsing the Anandtech website, and there's ads for
technology/hardware enthusiast stuff, that's both relevant and helps pay the
bills for Anandtech, enabling them to pay their staff.

I don't see why advertising needs to pervade every aspect of social media.
Imagining Facebook's advertising revenue cut by 85% really doesn't make me sad
at all. Facebook has to lay off some people, who will then go out into the
economy and get jobs possibly doing something more productive with their time
than selling advertising.

There is not a 1:1 venn diagram overlap between "the internet" (the actual
backbone and middle mile infrastructure that runs underneath) and "the web"
(http/https based content websites and social media things like instagram).

~~~
buboard
advertising will go wherever attention is. If you want facebook to stop making
uber-profits, fund an alternative, sell your FB stocks, lobby its engineers to
work for half as much money etc etc etc.

~~~
mistermann
I want Facebook and similar companies to stop doing things that are causing
significant harm to society.

Your approach seems unnecessarily complicated and prone to failure, I prefer
we instead pass legislation and solve the problem quickly and with largely
guaranteed success. Will this cause disproportionate harm to a relatively
small number of mostly wealthy people in the process? I imagine, but sometimes
life's not fair. Roll around crying tears in your piles of money.

Or, recognize that tempers are rising and mass torch construction planning is
underway, and adjust your business practices accordingly. No one is forcing
them to do anything, _yet_. They might not be so lucky if someone like a
Bernie Sanders was somehow able to slip through the political filters like
Trump managed to.

~~~
buboard
> to stop doing things that are causing significant harm to society.

When people say this, what they really mean is they prefer a society where
people are less empowered to speak their minds, looking into the past with
rose tinted glasses.

Meanwhile, society today is more educated, richer, healthier and more
cognizant of its problems than ever. Try telling a 50s housewife to stop
driving around her gas guzzler while smoking.

> I prefer we instead pass legislation and solve the problem quickly

and in the process demolish liberties - that's something only dictatorships
do.

> and mass torch construction planning is underway

That sounds a horrible thing to wish for. Such talk is purely vengeful. Even
if i don't care if facebook is shut down tomorrow (don't use it), it's pretty
clear people will start using the alternative the day after tomorrow, and that
may be VK or the chinese alternative. The social media cat is out of the bag
and it's wrong, indeed violent to take away people's empowered rights to
speech

Taking away people's rights to force-install someone's idea of utopia in a
society is called authoritarianism

~~~
allovernow
>> to stop doing things that are causing significant harm to society.

>When people say this, what they really mean is they prefer a society where
people are less empowered to speak their minds

Somehow I think you might be missing a pretty broad middle ground between
ridding society of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of yearly man
hours spent on convincing people to consume, and oppressively limiting
speech...

Personally I'm generally for rather limited legislation, but the depths to
which ad companies are going to vacuum and aggregate every bit of personal
information from our lives is, frankly, terrifying. A society wherin each and
every one of our actions, habits, and beliefs is monitored and recorded is
called a dystopia, and all that data is only a legislative handwave away from
an authoritarian nightmare.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but in this rare case I start to wonder if
some sort of legislation may be necessary, even given the typical heavy-
handedness and technological illiteracy of the legislative powers. But,
honestly, the layman has proven to be too ignorant to understand the scope of
this problem and vote with their clicks/wallet.

------
laurex
There's nothing inherently wrong with advertising. But if the business model
is trade users and their data for advertising revenue, there's no chance that
the users' best interest can be served. That said, as someone working on
social technology where we've expressly decided to not go down that path, it's
also clear that the dark patterns that an ad-driven approach lead to are also
effective at driving growth. I'm curious how many people will pay rather than
have their data collected and sold. My guess is that it takes more than just
being ethical to charge for social tech, it takes adding extra value as a
product as well. I'm betting my current career on the idea that there is an
alternative.

------
mr_toad
Are adds in America totally unregulated or something? Why hold Facebook to
different standards from anyone else?

And why are the people who complain about social media the most, also the
people who use it the most? Sounds like they’re pretty happy with it when they
can use it to push their agenda.

~~~
JohnFen
Ads in the US are very lightly regulated.

------
205guy
I think the solution is to ban the "algorithm" that determines your feed.
People sign up for posts and photos from friends and family and groups,
instead that is held hostage and released as a trickle with ads and fake
endorsements (your friends like brandX) and targeted stories chosen to trigger
emotions and go viral.

The feed should go back to being RSS essentially, that's what people really
expect out of fb/instagram.

Also, just like government sets limits on roadside advertising, online
advertising should be limited (area-wise or frequency), with clear distinction
and attribution for all ads. In addition, there should be limits to profiling
such that ads can't be shown to less than 10K viewers for example.

------
matheusmoreira
A ban on ads would be great but would not to be a universal solution. We need
anti-ad technology that works regardless of the legality of ads. Open source
blockers should come pre-installed with browsers, operating systems, router
firmwares.

------
houseboat
I hate the idea of ads:

When you get around to the concept of using ad-supported media for "free", you
know where you left off. For instance, if you were willing to give up on ads,
you'd make an explicit change to ban people from social media. It may not hurt
them in the long run, but it's certainly useful for people and probably also
for advertisers.

This way, advertisers get more value out of advertising, and they don't have a
need for ads on other platforms.

The big problem is not that you don't own all the content that you don't own,
but that many of your content is being used. That is not the same as blocking
adverts.

------
danfang
I wrote a similar article earlier this month, about the (hopefully) ad-free,
tracking-free future of social media: [https://medium.com/@dfang/what-will-
next-gen-social-networks...](https://medium.com/@dfang/what-will-next-gen-
social-networks-look-like-a5fda90cffb7)

It really lines up well with your points about engagement, advertiser
incentives, and political disinformation!

Here's to hoping people choose to use/build new social tools that better align
with our interests and values.

------
euske
I'd advocate a somewhat opposite direction. Require all the ad companies to
show which ad is paid by who, and how much. This will probably kill some ads,
but I guess some business still want to pay for the exposure of their
products.

Personally I don't think banning something or hiding something would work,
because people will always find alternative venues. Preemptively pushing the
transparency is the only way forward.

~~~
jacquesm
That's a more workable solution. Still, the bulk of the people will not care.

------
Animats
Maybe just stop making advertising a tax-deductible business expense.
Advertising in the US is negative-sum - the population is mostly spent out, so
it doesn't create demand, it just moves it around a bit. But it adds to the
price of products. In many cases, more than the price of producing the
product. Tax policy should not encourage that.

~~~
deafcalculus
Not saying this is a bad idea, but how will reduction in ads create more
demand? If anything, demand will go down because people working in ads will
lose jobs or get paid less.

------
drcross
It's nearly 2020, why can't I pay to get rid of Ads on Instagram, Facebook and
Google? There must be a price where it makes sense to do this. It baffles my
mind that there are billionaires out there who are being pestered by badly
placed ads.

~~~
OJFord
> It baffles my mind that there are billionaires out there who are being
> pestered by badly placed ads.

I like to imagine that behind every billionaire there's a 'Technical
Secretary', or whatever the title might be, installing PiHole and doing
whatever else to solve these stupid problems that for whatever reason their
employer doesn't realise is a stupid problem that every user of the employer's
app has.

------
thelock85
It’s kinda interesting that the response to social media ads is “ban them all”
when the same targeting system could be used to inform and educate people on
how to improve their station (and perhaps in the end, have more money to buy
stuff).

------
cm2012
It would become much harder for challenger companies to unseat incumbents.

------
buboard
Let's fundraise to run a facebook campaign to ban all the ads then!

------
erichocean
Why limit the ban to social media? I'm for a 100% ban on advertising in all
forms across all media with no exceptions.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
You're going to pay for all this formerly free stuff right?

------
jacquesm
What will happen is that the ads will go underground. You'll simply no longer
know whether the person talking to you is an 'ad' or really saying something
they stand behind. To some extent this is already happening, but banning ads
will push that to the limit.

Ads at least can be controlled by the platform to a degree with user generated
content that is _much_ harder because there is so much more of it.

------
hirundo
Advertising is speech. The more exceptions we carve into free speech, the
easier it is for governments to censor. It is authoritarian to dictate what
one person can say to another. That authority may be justified in limited
categories like threats or fraud. When those categories become too broad, the
authority gains a hugely powerful tool to manipulate and cement itself in
place.

I don't think I have the right to get between two people and silence one of
them, just because I think he's trying to sell something.

~~~
TotempaaltJ
Corporations don't, or shouldn't, have a right to free speech.

~~~
EpicEng
Says who, you? That's nice.

>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the Government for a redress of grievances

There's no mention of "people" or "citizen" in that text. The government
*cannot prohibit speech".

Of course, there are a few exceptions to that rule, but making more should
have an incredibly high bar for approval, and you want to use it for
advertising?

Enact laws that protect people from malicious and over zealous tracking, which
I'm sure we would both agree is a gross violation of privacy.

------
jdoliner
Banning things tends to lead to the market routing around the ban, via black /
grey markets. In the case of ads is hard for there to be a true black market,
because ultimately the ad needs to reach a users pupils. But I suspect if you
outright banned ads you'd get a lot of grey area, such as promoted posts,
affiliate messages, influencers. Things that blur the line between ads and
content. Instead I'd prefer a high excise tax on advertising transactions,
similar to how we tax cigarettes. That way it doesn't ban advertising
outright, but it does change the cost analysis on it, and it becomes a source
of revenue for the state that (in theory) everyone can benefit from.

