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Comment by antris | Hacker News Reader

I have recently started supporting a ban on targeted advertising. Dividing people into cultural bubbles and being able to spend unlimited dollars on it is dangerous if we are to maintain cultural unity and be able to agree on facts.

Also, when your advertising is not public and only visible to subsections of people, it is more difficult to investigate what is going on. Facebook can do it themselves, but do we want to rely on a single company to do it? But when the advertising is public, it is easier to have a public discussion and have a possible backlash to it.

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Since that'll never happen without toppling the money printing machines of several of the world's most powerful companies, I'd like to repeat an idea that I once heard -

A publicly available clearinghouse of all targeted ads published via a service so that researchers can find out

- Every ad published

- What targeting parameters were used, other basic data about the ad

- How many impressions the ad received

- How many clickthroughs, etc

It would not include any PII of those who saw the ads, only on the ads themselves. Bonus points if we can also have some kind of GUID "advertiser_id" that would allow researchers to tie the ads back to some kind of probably-anonymized-but-maybe-not entity that published the ad. The API would be defined in the regulation so that vendors can't pull any obfuscatory fuckery.

Sunlight is the first step in stopping this.

agreed to an extend, I simply feel that any idealistic / political advertiser needs to be in some sort of public ledger. The real blocker is transparency.

None of that will work. Sure, have some basic regulatory model for your political campaigns to avoid unduly intervention by foreign actors and similar shady stuff,but that is an small deterrent. You cannot avoid targeted advertising, hell, all advertising is in one way or another targeted. Even if you get rid of advertisement period, you will have to deal with stuff like famous academic Op-Eds, celebrities recommending who to vote for, media bias, etc. So you can control the blatant intervention but at the end you have to trust all voting citizens are discerning adults, savvy consumers of information in a complex world, although you know that is not true.

> You cannot avoid targeted advertising, hell, all advertising is in one way or another targeted

But there's a drastic difference in effectiveness. No one would support private ownership of nuclear weapons just because everyone has fists which are weapons also.

Hyper-targeted advertising has gone off rails recently and when you can simply buy your way into any specific segment of the population without having to put it under public scrutiny, you are asking for trouble.

What is the difference between targeted advertisement and targeted content? I’d argue targeted content is more dangerous because the intent of the content is not as clear as for an ad.

Btw the ad library on FB allows you to put scrutiny on those ads. In fact (some) journalists love to browse it to find a shocking ad and write a news story about it.

The difference is that you can throw unlimited money to guarantee to get eye pairs. The one with the most money will get their message across best. And also the advertising is part is much easier to regulate. We already have loads of regulations and limitations about advertisement, so there would be no problem adding one more.

Unless FB is in on the scam, you cannot buy eyepairs on the platform.

Please reread what I actually said. I didn't say to stop targeted advertising, but that who is targeting, how they're targeting, and what the ultimate reach of a given ad is should be publicly available. Targeted advertising is too powerful a force to remain completely in the dark as it has so far.

Since I turned off targeted advertising, youtube delights in showing me very graphic videos of earwax extraction. It feels like deliberate punishment and a not-so-gentle nudge to opt for more personalised ads.

Advertising, targeted or not, does not change the general public's ability to agree on facts or not, if indeed that ability exists at all.

If you're going to advocate for restricting free speech (by the state, no less) there had better be a great reason for it, not false claims like this one. It's a critical human right, not to be regulated lightly.

A vague desire for "cultural unity" is insufficient alone to start eroding human rights.

This is a great idea. Transparency is the real blocker here. On the other end, maybe idealistic / political advertisers need to register their content and spending in a public ledger.

What do you mean by targeted?

Is targeting knitters by advertising your knitting needles in a knitting magazine a problem in your mind?

That seems a really silly thing to want to ban, to me, and I think it will actually make enjoying advertising-supported content worse, not better.

On the other hand, I am a programmer and receive a lot of ads about basic programming courses or even something slightly tech related (build your own startup, how to improve your UI/UX skills etc.) that target me for what they think I do, but not for what I am really interested in.

I think good advertising shows people something that they don't already know a lot about to get them interested, knitters probably already have their channels to research about the tools they use.

If you want to have a look at a world without Internet targeting and cultural bubbles, go to the "Trending" tab in YouTube.

I am only talking about targeted advertisement, not internet or targeting of content.

If you pay for advertisement, you would not be able to target it based on personal data of the viewers.

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