Probably not, if you shoot a man, there's a perpetrator and an end. If you brainwash a man, forever his actions will no longer be fully his own. Plus most people view violence as something undesirable (see Vietnam war protests), but advertising still has many hawks who will never stop singing it's praises while all public spaces are consumed by corporate branding until we have no where uninfected

Is it? Would you rather be dead or a zombie?

Nuclear weapons have killed about ~200k people in all of history.

Advertising probably kills that many people most months when you consider things like:

* Convincing people that various groups needs to be genocided

* Convincing people to use cars instead of less dangerous methods of transportation

* Convincing people to use fossil fuels instead of less polluting forms of energy

* Convincing people to eat unhealthy foods

* Convincing people to smoke cigarettes

I'm not convinced that advertising is less dangerous than nuclear weapons.

"good" and "sociology" are surely carrying a lot of weight in that statement. What does "good" mean applied in this context?

I'm not sure I see the connection to sociology though, do yo mean behavioral economics?

But the knowledge we gain is only about triggering the bad paths of human brain, like addiction, greed, FOMO, etc. And who is "we" anyway, this stuff isn't public.

TikTok will make $11B in ad revenue this year. It is their business model. This is twice as large as Twitter's business, and a third of Instagram or YouTube.

Jeff Hammerbacher.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/

It's from a reworking of Howl by Allen Ginsburg, reframing it for our era.

The original is an amazing poem well worth reading

https://poets.org/poem/howl-parts-i-ii

no. it's better to contribute nothing than contribute net harm.