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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

There's only one sure way to eliminate fraud in advertising: stop advertising. Google is attempting to make it more difficult for malefactors to use its systems, but this disregards the fact that advertising is not a socially beneficial activity and all advertising is an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public.

Therefore, a harm reduction justification is insufficient as it presumes there is some benefit worth the harms being introduced. In fact, there is no benefit and Google is only reducing harm slightly.

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> the fact that advertising is not a socially beneficial activity and all advertising is an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public

That's not a fact, that's your opinion. Advertising is a form of communication and like most communication, the person originating the communication often has a goal or desired outcome in mind. That you or me might not like their goals or the message that they communicate doesn't mean that no one finds it valuable, nor does it mean that we should ban all communication.

> Advertising is a form of communication and like most communication, the person originating the communication often has a goal or desired outcome in mind.

So what? It's still "an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public". Advertising is adversarial, it's fundamentally bullshit.

Leela : Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"

Fry : Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

How is that "a socially beneficial activity"?

> "an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public".

So does a persuasive essay, but I don't see any calls for bans for those.

Persuasive essays aren't shoved everywhere you go in an attempt to separate you from your money, usually via deceit, at least in the US. Just look at how they all have asterisks and fine print unable to be read. Also I can choose not to read an essay, it's harder to tune out all advertising.

Uhh, pretty much everything the media writes nowadays is an advert in some way... Ever visited Medium.com? "No ads" but full of them.

There are many groups out there dedicated to spreading their ideals and ideas as well. Religions, paleo diets, and fringe political ideas are shoved at you everywhere you go as well without any monetary transactions involved with advertising, let alone the single party ones like business signage. I am afraid advertising isn't unique in those objections.

> So what? It's still "an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public". Advertising is adversarial

So is what you just wrote. Should we ban discussion on HN because it is (or can be) adversarial?

HN has balanced discussions because of the voting system, moderators (banning voting rings and spammers) and that anyone can voice their counter-arguments.

Advertising on the other hand is one-sided. If there was a universal ad platform where people could vote on ads (where overly negative feedback would get the ad taken down) and comment below them then it wouldn’t be that much of a problem.

Finally HN is something you choose to participate in in your own time. Advertising doesn’t give you a choice on whether you want to see it.

> Advertising on the other hand is one-sided.

Most ad platforms allow anyone to submit an add. Most add platforms are moderated.

> Advertising doesn’t give you a choice on whether you want to see it.

Of course it does. When I'm reading a book I don't see advertisements. They aren't beamed into my brain, they're the price of admission for certain services I gain value from

> Most ad platforms allow anyone to submit an add

I can submit another ad but I can't make it appear right below the previous ad I would like to "comment" on.

> Most add platforms are moderated

What about fake technical support numbers, or the variety of scams/quack products on Facebook that make impossible claims and prey on the vulnerable/stupid?

> When I'm reading a book I don't see advertisements

When I take public transport I see ads regardless. Same applies to a lot of services that are near-essential nowadays. Certain government agencies sell your details to spam operations (also a certain form of advertising) and you can't opt out. Most commercial products include spyware which track you and rat you out to ad platforms regardless of whether you even see any ads directly.

So should we ban restaraunts from having signs out front?

As far as I know most locations have rules on what a sign can look like and what it can do. I don't think it would be legal to have a sign with a powerful strobe lamp, one that shoots lasers in people's eyes to attract their attention or one that blasts loud music (which would be the equivalent of flashy, distracting ads that we see on the web).

Also with a restaurant sign there's a business behind it with someone that can be held accountable for it. If you see an obvious scam or a fraudulent service advertised you can complain to them or the authorities and get it shut down. With online ads they can be purchased either completely anonymously (maybe even with a stolen credit card) or by a shell company somewhere on the other side of the world where you would have no recourse.

> As far as I know most locations have rules on what a sign can look like and what it can do. I don't think it would be legal to have a sign with a powerful strobe lamp, one that shoots lasers in people's eyes to attract their attention or one that blasts loud music

Most ad groups have regulations on what ads can and cannot do.

> With online ads they can be purchased either completely anonymously (maybe even with a stolen credit card) or by a shell company somewhere on the other side of the world where you would have no recourse.

Check the thread you're in. It's about an ad network addressing this specific problem.

> Most ad groups have regulations on what ads can and cannot do.

How do you explain Facebook ads for scams that claim price X but actually hammer your payment cards with multiple X * 10 charges until it declines? A friend got caught by that, we ended up doing a chargeback but Facebook didn't get punished in any way despite their complicity in this fraud.

How do you explain tech support scam ads?

How do you explain "chumboxes" like Outbrain/Taboola as in here: https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern... (the image URLs are broken, you need to manually get the image's URLs, change the protocol to HTTPS and open the resulting link to see them).

Maybe some ad groups have internal regulations, but I as a user have no control of which ad networks I'm exposed to. On the other hand, in the street, all businesses have to comply with local laws and given that I don't see scam tech support banners or credit card scams advertised on storefronts I guess the laws are working, and if they aren't, laws can be amended if there's enough public support for it (some locations completely banned billboards for example).

> Check the thread you're in. It's about an ad network addressing this specific problem.

"Google will suspend the accounts of advertisers that do not provide proof of identity, including W9 forms, passports and other personal identification and business incorporation files"

Seems like a pretty low bar to clear with either forged documents (again, someone already breaking the law with scam or spam ads isn't going to be deterred by this), paying vulnerable people in a slum for scans of their passports or just using a string of shell companies to muddy the trail.

Fraud is a hard problem. It's fairly easy to find individual examples of malfeasance, the relevant question is what percentage of online ads are scams, compared to ads in other media.

I'll also note that you're now no longer arguing that advertisements are unethical, but that online advertisements are unethical, and not because they're "an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public" as was originally stated, or even because, as you originally claimed "Advertising doesn’t give you a choice on whether you want to see it."

We've moved the goalposts quite a bit. And I'm not interested in an in the weeds argument about the challenges of online fraud prevention. It won't be fruitful for anyone. I've proven my original point: you don't line online advertisements (and that's OK!), but you also don't have a clear reason that they're uniquely different than any other form of advertising, and you don't believe that advertising, in general, is unethical.

And now on the HN front page:

> In the mid-twentieth century, courts applying the antitrust laws held that such persuasive advertising is anticompetitive and harmful to consumers, but the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was unable to pursue an antitrust campaign against persuasive advertising for fear of de-priving consumers of advertising’s information value. Now that the information function of most advertising is obsolete, the FTC should renew its campaign against persuasive advertising by treating all advertising beyond the minimum required to ensure that product information is available to online searchers as monopolization in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act.

~ "The Obsolescence of Advertising in the Information Age" https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-obsolescence-of-a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22991286

To be fair, when it comes to being valuable, criminals consider violence like armed robbery and murder valuable because it helps them achieve their goals, and yet we agree that those things are not a benefit to society and created laws to discourage and punish such acts.

Certainly the criminals doesn't agree don't you think ? One side just happen to have more power to forced the other side to comply. There is no agreement. The more powerfull one get to decide what the law is.

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