Some part of the population is always going to use deception and weakness of others.
I don't think there is a "general fix". You just have to constantly show them where the boundaries are and the cost of crossing them.
Taking advantage of the expectation, that a general fix is possible, is what gets Charlatans and Panderers into power.
That said, despite the fact that it has been easier to take advantage of the weaknesses in the population faster and at scales never before, (imagine a shark, overnight, growing more efficient at hunting/doubling its kill count and hunting grounds, and that trait spreading to all sharks by the next day) that same pace causes natural born predators to bump into each other more, clashing more frequently, expending more resources/energy in empire defense.
There is no free lunch, even to the mindlessly ambitious douchebags of society. They put up an appearance that there is.
> that same pace causes natural born predators to bump into each other more, clashing more frequently, expending more resources/energy in empire defense.
And that's a problem in this case, because it's not like any of the predators in ad industry actually dies. They just deliver less money for the parties that employed/contracted them.
Advertising has a different dynamic than regular predation, because in a saturated market, effort of any party serves only to cancel out the efforts of every other party. It's a zero-sum game that can consume near-infinite amount of energy and resources. Now think of all the man hours, electricity, fossil fuels, papers, paints, toxic chemicals and human dignity - all wasted in a zero sum game - and tell me again that advertisers "expending more resources/energy in empire defense" is a good thing. It's the opposite - it'll eat our economy and kill us through side effects of all the resource wastage.
I don't think there is a "general fix". You just have to constantly show them where the boundaries are and the cost of crossing them.
Taking advantage of the expectation, that a general fix is possible, is what gets Charlatans and Panderers into power.
That said, despite the fact that it has been easier to take advantage of the weaknesses in the population faster and at scales never before, (imagine a shark, overnight, growing more efficient at hunting/doubling its kill count and hunting grounds, and that trait spreading to all sharks by the next day) that same pace causes natural born predators to bump into each other more, clashing more frequently, expending more resources/energy in empire defense.
There is no free lunch, even to the mindlessly ambitious douchebags of society. They put up an appearance that there is.