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Comment by patrick451 | Hacker News Reader

> Sarah Bromma, Pinterest’s head of policy, said in an interview that the rule change prioritised Pinterest users’ “emotional and mental health and wellbeing, especially those directly impacted by eating disorders or diet culture or body shaming”

What about their physical well being? Morbid Obesity is no joke.

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Pinterest isn't condoning morbid obesity. They're stopping adverts for things that are pretty much always a scam.

Besides, unregulated weight loss pills bought over the internet aren't a solution for weight loss. For a start you have no idea what's in them. They can range from ineffective fake medicine to actively harmful and dangerous amphetamines. If someone wants to lose weight there are better, safer ways to go about it. Banning adverts is a good start to prompting people to seek better solutions.

If that's the case, why don't they say that? There are a lot of words in this which are lifted from the fat-acceptance movement talking points.

You'll note, as mentioned in tfa, that things like weight-loss pills and before/after imagery were already against the site's policy.

I would think it's more the fact that targeting diet ads to obese people is just creepy and obnoxious, because pretty much all ad targeting tends to be creepy and obnoxious.

Though I agree with others that their statement was kind of overly-political. Are they going to ban skinny models from all ads next?

If they ban Coca Cola ads, we'll know they are serious.

It's no joke, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be cured by "one weird old trick Discovered By <zipcode> mom that doctor's don't want you to know about".

Which is what a large fraction of the advertising in this space looks like to me.

Weight loss adds dont lead to weight loss. They dont improve anyone physical well being.

  >...users' emotional and mental health and wellbeing

What about the emotional health and wellbeing of internet users who have to put up with Pinterest's '6 million domains and counting, so you'll never be able to block them all -Ha! Ha!' pollution of our search results.

Your search engine should be fixing that problem. It’s what they do. Or at least what they used to do. Google seems way more interested in serving up ads than good search results nowadays.

I used to use uMatrix before it was abandoned by its developer. I had to block literally dozens of pinterest<dot><some TLD> domains but still more kept showing up in search results. I think Pinterest have literally registered every single TLD out there.

Of course none of that answers the question as to why they're showing up in search results in the first place --even when completely irrelevant to what I'm searching for. In fact Pinterest is such a vacuous waste of space it practically makes Quora look useful.

I'm sure any other business would get blacklisted by the search engines for such search result spamming.

It isn't, but I don't think weight loss advertising is necessarily the answer to that.

Random people or ads telling fat people they should feel bad and go on a diet does not work.

Do you have data to back that up, or is it conjecture?

Do you have evidence of the contrary?

A 5 s search leads to this page from the US gov: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/truth-behind-weight-lo...

Note that this page warns against weight loss ads — not weight loss, which they argue is a more complicated topic than an ad will convey.

Further: https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459

> Do you have evidence of the contrary?

I'm not the one who carries the burden of proof, but I appreciate the sources. Thank you.

It's hardly conclusive, but here you go:

> Among patients whose PCPs discussed weight loss, 20.1% achieved ≥ 10% weight loss if they did not perceive judgment by their PCP as compared to 13.5% who perceived judgment.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00917...

Shaming leads to stress overeating and to unvillingness to go to public which lowers physical activity is what I remember reading.

Yes, it also presents goals that seem out of reach - and likely are out of reach. "Don't be a fat slob. Look like a model." If the focus is on building a sustainable, healthy lifestyle, people are more likely to see that as attainable.

Most sustainable ways to be healthy are not as easy to monetize as quick "fixes" like pills and shakes. Don't drink sugar or artificially sweetened products (I haven't kept up on the more recent artificial sweeteners, so maybe they're not as bad - idk). Eat more vegetables and less processed food. Get some exercise - even if it's just walking.

It's good for people to understand that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes and that your goal should be whatever size/shape is healthy for you. This is more of a range than an exact size/shape.

So, yeah, shaming, presenting unrealistic goals, selling bs products/fixes, it's mostly all bad, and it's good for people to push back against these ads and the POV's they create.

Then why are people paying to run these ads to begin with?

There will always be people happy to sell things that don't work.

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