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Comment by clort | Hacker News Reader

What I think is different about targeted online advertising is that the ads targeted at specific groups may never be visible to other groups. A company can outright lie to a pre-selected group who they consider do not have the knowledge, skill or time to counter the lies.

There is a non-zero chance that TV timeslots are seen by people not in the targeted group. A billboard in a school zone may have a high chance of being seen by naive young moms but the canny young moms will also see it, along with dads and grandparents picking up kids, not to mention hundreds of other people who live and work in the area.

> it doesn't make sense to make a company waste money

except it does, to keep them accountable

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So the law should be against deceptive, false, or otherwise misleading ads. The law shouldn't be against targeted advertising based on age or any other socioeconomic grouping.

Yes, but practically how does that work? It's fine to make misleading adverts illegal, but then if you only choose to show them to segments that are naive about the law and never make complaints, perhaps you'll get away with it?

Thinking out loud: Maybe companies should be required to keep an archive of all advertising. They'd display it on their own website and adverts that were considered misleading or had any upheld complaints would be necessarily marked?

Banning age discrimination is _how_ the law is against deceptive, false, and discriminating ads.

Britain had exactly this issue a few years back with Cambridge Analytica and targeted facebook advertising (the biggest scandal was actually the extra campaign funding that was spent on it), it wasn't until the scandal was long over that the actual list of adverts was released and people found them horrifying, but the people who were against them had _never_ seem them at the actual time because it was so heavily targeted.

Targeting messages is another form of hiding them and dividing people up.

I get outright scam ads on YouTube, from YouTube once a week at least, and nothing ever happens to make them stop because I don't care enough to invest the insane amount of effort it will take to reach someone at YouTube that would care enough to stop it. And then the next outright scam add will pop up. So I am not sure by what mechanism this accountability functions if it can't stop blatant scams on YouTube adds.

You can report them fairly quickly, there should be a "report" button directly on/under the ad itself. I'm not sure how effective it is at stopping these sort of ads, but it is a step you can easily take.

I've never reported a Youtube ad, but I have reported two Facebook ads that lied in their displayed URL.

The the ads were for scummy "wonder-supplements", but displayed the URL of a newspaper that had nothing to do with the ad, I guess to try and get some legitimacy.

I couldn't write what was wrong with the ad in my report, only choose from some very broad categories, and both the reports were rejected with "ad is not in voilation of our guidelines".

I've stopped reporting lying Facebook ads.

And I doubt Google does this much better.

I had this option for a while, it went away after I reported a couple of adds. Now I can't report adds anymore.

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