How do you prevent those alternative ways of discovering products from getting flooded by masqueraded ads?
Fundamentally, ad markets can't hide from enforcement, so long as whoever's buying the ads is a commercial entity interacting with the financial system. Which it usually is: the primary reason to buy ads is to boost sales of something that's being sold on the open marketspace, overtly and conspicuously. (If it's being advertised, it must be conspicuous, right?)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Whistleblower_Office?usesk...
[late edit]: In short—if society wants to ban ads, that's a thing that's enforceable and difficult to evade.
I don't like advertising, but this sounds awful.
What counts as "advertising"?
Why can't groups of people climb up an attention gradient and build things?
Lots of useful things could not exist without advertising.
- "Why can't groups of people climb up an attention gradient and build things?"
Why should the attention gradient be an auction market?
How would you enforce laws against shills? Doesn't many influencer work for free samples etc? I am way more worried for misuse of such laws than shills in the first place. I'd rather people just don't trust celebrities for consumer advice.
By the letter of the law, that's a form of remuneration, and is mandatory to disclose.
- "A “material connection” to the brand includes a personal, family, or employment relationship or a financial relationship – such as the brand paying you or giving you free or discounted products or services."
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-... ("Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers")
How do developed countries stop people cutting their products with cheaper alternatives?
How do we enforce weights and measures legislation so every shop visit doesn't require you to lug along your own standard weights and scales?
How do we stop investments being all scams (ok so this one has failed a bit in the US.)
The answer is competent regulation with active enforcement. Tie reviews to a government issued ID. Enforce stiff penalties for any company found to be pissing in the communal data pool.
"How do you get legislation passed to regulate advertising when it controls almost every media and social media platform through which voters can get informed on the topic?"
And if you have an answer to that I'd dearly love to hear it - I work at a campaign for electoral reform in the UK and we have near enough the exact same problem.
I'm not saying that's the answer. I'm not saying it's not the answer.
We do not need tech innovators, corporations or pioneering extroverted CEOs to market-innovate solutions to the problems we have. We can simply lean on expertise and scientific consensus and mandate that it apply to various industries and our world as a whole, and drive society forward. The legal pen has power too and we can use it for more than just ensuring Disney has infinite copyrights, and in fact, should.
It's not going to fix everything, of course. But a lot of major issues could see huge improvements if we simply used our Governmental processes to demand them. We KNOW how to make vehicles more efficient. We KNOW how to reduce other emissions. We KNOW that certain building practices and city policies are making numerous social ills worse. We know all of these things and we know how to stop them, but our politicians are content to ride out the collapse and cash their checks in the meantime and retire before the world falls apart.
None of these problems are really new and have been looked for millennia by now.
"Let's ban advertising" "How?" "Laws" "It's depressing people can't think of this" "Enlightened dictatorship isn't going to help"
…suggests thinking in a false dichotomy. We don't need a dictatorship, enlightened or otherwise, to have laws.
(No Brexit jokes allowed :P)
(Whether they care about the risk or see it as an opportunity for enriching themselves, that's a separate matter).
Ads appeal to the lowest of the low of human animalistic desires to buy the "cheapest" shit shipped all the way across the world while their neighbors struggle to make a living producing the same kind of product.
I totally agree, advertising is antisocial and unethical by definition.
That said: I don't think of "public information campaigns" as advertising, yet also I mention this specifically because I can see the poorly defined boundary between awareness and manipulation — most advertising feels to me like government propaganda, just from a different master, and propaganda can be information as well as disinformation.
Get off this internet. Go get a meetup, buy an island. build some buildings. build your own super anti-social internet on your island. View webpages made by your neighbors on the "east side" of the island.
oh, and stop using products that exist because advertising has allowed the funding to make them exist. or - just move to n korea.