The case for banning ads in social media
chanind.github.io
chanind.github.io
Some examples (with a couple bonus pictures of London removing billboards): https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret....
It also takes over public space - the fountain at Piccadilly Circus has been used as a convenient meeting point, but in recent years the whole area has been inaccessible in the winter due to extra advertising hoarding.
And I say this as someone that abhors advertising.
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.
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.
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.
You're used to a secondary attribute, so you associate it with the actual thing. It's like growing up with muscle cars, and associating loud noise with a powerful engine. Well, we've also got electric cars. Peace and quiet doesn't mean a slow car.
What could possibly go wrong?
I dont think the calls for ban are solely for aesthetic reasons
The Eiffel Tower was built as basically an advertisement for Eiffel's company.
The Rainier R is also became an icon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainier_Brewing_Company#/media...
Eiffel paid a huge chunk of the cost of it, and had his name put on it. It's no different from businesses funding a sports stadium in exchange for it being named after the business.
It's awesome advertising.
I've often wondered why Microsoft didn't fund NASA probe missions in exchange for writing "Microsoft" on the side of the rocket or other such considerations. It'd be a win for all concerned.
From the point of view of the victims, it as intrusion on their thoughts of attention, and almost always an attempt to implant a desire into their mind.
Ads are art to the same degree that cannibalism is gastronomy.
plus i m not sure if you re aware how extreme your position is
Most of our beautiful classical art was advertisements for the Church
most graffiti is uglier than ads
I guess that's why I hate so much of it.
Also the bloody hymns that are popular this season. Especially the castrati voices.
My taste runs toward punk, black metal, acid house, and trance.
Wait, aren't you the person who just wrote "think different"? I'm confused.
> Most of our beautiful classical art was advertisements for the Church
Sure, and Jesus was a Marxist, or something... If you try to force XXI century concepts into XIV century realities you can arrive at silly over-simplified conclusions such as the one above.
> most graffiti is uglier than ads
This is your opinion. Graffitis are not trying to manipulate me.
That being said I don’t disagree with the rest of your post.
Good one.
So maybe a couple years ago, being a klutz, I brushed a finger against a red-hot stovetop grill. There was a hiss, with ~no pain at first. And creepily, a delicious smell.
Took months to heal. And hurt like fuck.
But that smell. Damn.
The point is that the delicious food smell from burning myself severely was unexpected, distracting ... and worse, rather invasive, and hard to put out of mind.
So that's like being confronted by advertising that triggers some unconscious drive. It puts some new thought in your head, which leads you to do something that you otherwise wouldn't. So that'a invasive just like the smell of ones braising flesh, which bringsd up thoughts of eating.
That is, the riff that art to advertising is like gastronomy to cannibalism. Or at least, autocannibalism.
There's also similarity between advertising and sexual assault. The possibility that a victim -- like a victim of advertising -- will come to enjoy the experience. And end up being betrayed by their body. Which arguably is one of thge worst parts of the experience. Seeing ads is rather like brain rape.
Really? So I shouldn't be in most public spaces? I reject that notion.
The counter to my statement that I would agree with is "that's just one of the irritations you have to put up with in our society".
You know about them, but millions of people don't. Every day people learn new things that they never paid attention to before.
It does not just "look better in a photo". People are allowed to walk on their daily lives without being bombarded by flashing, highly targeted, hyper-optimised psychological manipulation. Without adverts that make them feel bad, inferior, missing out, all so they buy whatever shit the man with the money is peddling. They are allowed to decorate their buildings and public spaces with aesthetically pleasing art and decoration.
It's a major improvement in quality of life.
I'm fine with that. Most jobs in advertising produce little to no social utility, and the labor spend doing them should be redirected into more socially beneficial directions. Less ad targeting and construction of ever more garish billboards, more teaching and medical care, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
Want to have more than 100 tweets? You pay for it...
Mastodon/GNU Social/any blog platform in existence coupled with syndication feeds.
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.
Yes, this is what the article says. 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?
It's not impossible to imagine that, say, Microsoft and Apple, in competition for users, could start filtering advertisements in the browsers. That this pulls users from Chrome. And changes the landscape yet another time.
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.
And with ads the mechanism is really obvious—-it helps people identify products that solve their problems.
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.
But I don't really think that adverse economic impact is one of them.
The shortsightedness of such thinking amazes me.
If people couldn't easily monetize the platform the way Facebook does it opens up the market for diverse platforms. Monetizing email service is notoriously difficult and Gmails lack of in-app advertising sets a playing field nobody else can exploit for massive growth. That has probably in large part been what has kept IMAP alive while XMPP and other open communication protocols died - the ubiquity and lack of ability to dilute the user experience with ads for profit keeps predatory competition out. That hasn't stopped Google from doing some seedy shit in recent years with their position but even they have to be conservative on radical anti-user behavior that would drive their base off Gmail - because their userbase can leave. Its the beauty of decentralization.
It seems more delusional to predict the future (nobody would use it) with confidence.
I know framing such things as false dichotomies is kinda what educated Western intellectuals do, but God or nature impose no such limitations on us. We are free to think, negotiate, create hybrid solutions and adjust as necessary, and so forth and so on. We have the ability to largely be the masters of our own destiny, but waking up and making that choice is our responsibility, not God's.
Ok then, can you restate your prediction of the future without the use of figures of speech? Calling people delusional who disagree with an utterly vague warning seems a bit inappropriate.
> It's easy to settle the question with a poll: ask people worldwide if you 'd pay $40/year for FB. My bet would be it's < 5%
I like this much better, as it is no longer suggestive that certain approaches cannot be done for certain reasons, and instead only poses a perfectly valid question with an explicitly speculative bet about what the answer would be. Fantastic.
Or more likely, the AT&T/Verizon model of charging $0.10 / message which was the norm before internet-based communication became common.
Google offers me Gmail for $5/mo. Why won't they do that with search? Why won't FB or Twitter do the same? Ad-free google search is easily worth >$28/yr and I'd gladly pay it.
Given the enormous armies of engineers in the employ of Google, FB, Twitter, etc, and the fact that Google already offers paid services on non-search products, the ONLY explanation is malice.
How about instead we just stop using Facebook? I dropped it 3 years ago and haven't missed it one bit.
Yes. I dropped it much earlier than that, and have suffered no inconvenience or problem as a result.
What is the correct price? Do Facebook and other internet companies have some sort of a God given right to at least their current revenues? If so, why do I have to comply with a whole slew of laws and regulations that society has "decided" are better for the greater good, but we can't impose similar restrictions on them?
> Also the necessary 20% price increase every year
Lest the executives maybe make more money but a smaller profit margin? How about instead of spending resources on psychological exploitation of their userbase, they either cancel that expenditure or redirect it to adding beneficial features that users want to pay for?
> How about instead we just stop using Facebook?
If that can solve the problem, I'm happy to consider it.
> I dropped it 3 years ago and haven't missed it one bit.
And yet, we still seem to have a problem.
Once again, an utterly obvious problem seems unfixable because of some combination of excessive corporate influence over politicians combined with a disinterested public who seems to have been convinced that humans live in a world whose parameters we have absolutely no control over, all while being told how superior, powerful, and necessary democracy is. Meanwhile, over in China, when something is causing problems, the problem maker is asked to stop, and if he doesn't, he is made to stop, or else. And from anything I've seen, the Chinese government seems to be improving the well being of their citizens at a rapid pace (in both relative and absolute terms), and they have high support from the public, despite the lack of absolutely necessary Democracy.
Why is it that a bi-partisan group of politicians can't get together to come up with a plan to improve the situation, and while they're doing that telegraph to these social media companies that something is going to be done, possibly very much not to their liking, so it might be in their best interests to come up with a plan B of their own that is fundamentally different than the pure advertising model of the day? Of course, there are many reasons for this, one of them being that the political system in most Western countries is effectively broken and outdated, completely incapable of managing the complexities of the over-optimized societies that the scientists and technologists have built for us, while no corresponding discipline developed to handle important questions like whether just because we can do something, should we do it?
As always, I imagine we will just continue the charade of pointing our fingers at each other and the Russians, fiddling while Rome burns, as China grows ever more powerful and socially united.
I hope I at least live long enough to see how this will be explained away in the future as something that "no one" could see coming, just as "no one" could have seen the 2008 housing bubble coming.
Would you be willing to excerpt some particular quotes that you believe were most compelling in your formation of this perception?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The goal isn't to eradicate ads, it's to make them cost more so there's overall less of it (or that it's embedded in ways that don't seem like ads).
I'd argue that product placement is less bad than outright attention theft. Because I ignore it or I notice and think less of the content (or in some cases it's like Waynes World where it's a mockery of the product placement which bolsters the content).
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.
Advertising is free speech.
>As far as I'm concerned, corporations are not people and have no rights.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion.
>Like governments, a corporation's powers are defined by law.
The law defines corporations as entities with rights, including the right to free speech, and therefore they have an abstract form of personhood for various legal reasons. If corporations had no rights, they would have no right to enter into contracts as a singular entity, nor would they have the right to use, or to be sued as entities.
and how do i know you 're not paid for that comment?
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.
And, what about corporations that are people? That is, a small business run by one person, like an Etsy shop?
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.
It's the tracking (online and offline) that's unpalatable.
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.
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).
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.
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
>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.
Maybe sometimes, but banning advertisement based business models doesn't necessarily constrain free speech in any major way, and it is in no way my intent. I in no way advocate restrictions in speech beyond this particular "restriction in free speech", but I am always open to consider new ideas.
> 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.
This seems completely orthogonal to the topic. Does this have something to do with "looking into the past with rose tinted glasses", which I also don't understand?
> and in the process demolish liberties - that's something only dictatorships do.
That statement is objectively false. Democracies have thousands upon thousands of laws that "demolish liberties".
> That sounds a horrible thing to wish for.
I agree, so you'll be happy to hear that not only do I not wish for it, I would very much like to avoid it happening.
> Such talk is purely vengeful.
Not purely. It can also be an observation of increasing polarization and anger forming in a society. This topic has appeared quite frequently in a variety of media reports over the last several years, and it seems like a reasonable thing to be concerned with.
> it's pretty clear people will start using the alternative the day after tomorrow, and that may be VK or the chinese alternative
That is a prediction of the future, and regardless of whether it is "clear" to you, the certainty of arbitrary predictions actually occurring is not. And if it does come to pass, we can react accordingly.
> The social media cat is out of the bag and it's wrong, indeed violent to take away people's empowered rights to speech
Lots of people have imaginative opinions about what is "wrong" and "violent", but this has always been so, and mankind has always had to find a way to come to compromise. Having an opinion is fine, but keep in mind everyone has them.
> Taking away people's rights to force-install someone's idea of utopia in a society is called authoritarianism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by strong central power and limited political freedoms.[1] Political scientists have created many typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government.[1] Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic in nature, and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military.[2][3] etc etc etc
And once again, you'll be pleased to learn I have no intention of "force-installing my idea of utopia" in society, any more than thousands of political representatives in the past intended to when they advocated for various legislation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those last few points is why I have no personal conflict considering modern advertising wholly independent of free speech. Advertising for the purpose of informing someone a product exists would have been fine... in 1920. In 2019 there is no longer limited access to information like that. If I have a problem that needs solving I can seek out information on it on my own. I don't need corporations shoving it in my face against my will as much as they can.
And on top of that they don't do it just for informative purposes. Modern advertising has become cancerous and predatory in its attempts to manipulate people into buying things they don't homeostatically want with money they probably don't have. Its exploitative "speech" meant to rob people designed and implemented by those who hold degrees in psychological sciences meant to take advantage of human biochemistry for profit.
I'd be willing to hear a compromise position on the validity of informational advertising - a side banner that says "Duracell ranked the longest lasting battery by XXX independent group!" but not "Duracell batteries will save your life because they last longer, if you don't buy our batteries your kids will die!" is less unethical. But its a slippery slope - advertisers will always want to exploit people psychologically rather than just be informative. Thats more profitable. I don't think for a second the marginal information utility of unsolicited advertising - remember, information age - is worth the constant attempts for exploitation that modern advertising is wholly immersed in.
>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.