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Comment by patkai | Hacker News Reader

Already four years ago they ran experiments [1] on how to program your mood. They built an API to your emotions, and they started selling it, without you knowing it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

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Are you proposing a law against trying to manipulate people's moods?

You mean a law against non-consensual psychological experiments? Yes.

Would this not outlaw the entire field of marketing and advertising? It's essentially entirely to cause an emotional reaction that bypasses your logical need centers to encourage you to purchase something.

Not the previous commenter, but many people have looked critically at marketing and media long enough to come to exactly this conclusion, myself included.

To my mind, there is something inherently wrong about the techniques used to sway opinion about products and services. They prey on our animalian reflexes and bypass the part of the brain even capable of consent. Marketing "should" (and I don't use that word often) be prohibited to use such tactics, and instead be an exposition of the product and service and any traceable, trustworthy qualifications bestowed upon it. Such a system is still hackable (selling awards for instance), but it's a way better alternative to marketing practices than what we have today.

I dislike advertising and I'd love to see marketing move from a "push" to a "pull" model, where consumers ask for information about products they want. It's not easy to see how we get there. Defending the right of consumers to block ads, and moving from ad-based funding to subscriptions could be a start. An outright ban on ads - I don't see how that could happen without overreaching to non-infringing speech.

This whole thread of comments seems constructed. The obvious answer to a obvously leading question ending in 3 (mine is the 4th) replies that basically disagrees with regulating advertisers. the first reply of the 3 belongs to one of the participants, but how and why would two more suddenly start participating in this thread many hours after the original post left the front page? It looks exactly like the strategy russia was using to manipulate social media conversations.

I can't comment about the other two posters, but I'm still waiting to hear how a law making it illegal to make inferences about people's behavior could possibly work. It sounds like the poster didn't think about the suggestion very carefully.

Sounds dodgy. If I give you a free refill to see how you react, I go to jail?

That’s incredibly broad. Seems over the top.

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