Social media companies made $11B in US ad revenue from minors, study finds

Which other kinds of marketing?

An ad on TV or on the highway does not have the capability of taking into account the network of people you follow and whether you have a habit of being awake at 3AM browsing posts about break ups.

There's a constant, gradual pervasive shift towards having ads in more private and intimate spaces.

Is that really something that needs to be clarified? People in general know that social media companies make money through advertising, not by directly charging their users.

Between uBlock in the browser, ReVanced apps[1] (YouTube, Twitter/X, TikTok), DNS ad filtering[2], and Spotify Premium, I don't see ads. It takes some effort but isn't that hard for an HN poster.

Also, I'm quite skeptical of caffeine and aspartame being bad for health (in adults at least).

[1] https://revanced.app/

[2] https://mullvad.net/pl/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls#...

I have problems with my partner. She keeps falling for these scams and it is so tedious explaining to her why I think something is a scam (usually various coach programmes, how to get wealthy and so on) and often times scammers use quite clever manipulation techniques, so that she believes them more than myself. She gets upset and say "everything is a scam to you!" and I say "no, it happens that you are being attracted to these kind of offers and so the Facebook / whatever algorithms keep pushing more of these at you". She goes "you just don't want me to succeed in life!" and so on. She even got to some (probably a cult) meeting telling her how she could invest her money without paying tax. When I told her that these things are illegal and not going to work, she says that I am just stupid and everyone does it. Then I showed her analysis of one of such schemes done by a reputable accountant, she says that it's just a smear campaign. It's so so exhausting. I wish advertising was more regulated. I am probably going to install some sort of ad blocking on the network level. Does anyone know about good PiHole tutorial? How can I hook it up to the router?

I also been thinking about contacting Trading Standards, but I have a feeling they are not doing anything about it. Technically those scams are not illegal in the UK. Anyone can pretend to be an adviser and they can sell any sort of pie in the sky schemes without bearing any liability.

I do not have kids but the education first approach always sounds like the best one

That being said NextDNS is pretty awesome and will get a ton of it (plus has other features great for kids) and can be installed on any iOS device using a Profile (no local VPN needed). On Android you can simply use the built in OS DNS feature. And of course it's easy on Windows and MacOS as well.

That combined with either Orion browser (either using the built in blocking or installing Firefox Ublock in Orion) is pretty damn good on iOS. On Android or Windows then Firefox plus Ublock Origin is also an awesome combo.

This won't block the inline YouTube ads but you could of course pay for YT premium or find other ways around it. And Spotify family at 15$ is not a bad deal to get 5 people no add full premium for music.

> Caffeine is bad for health People who drink those are addicts

Imagine teaching your kids intolerance based on pseudo-science.

I just think it’s crazy a six year old is even on a device instead of being a six year old playing and what not. I was writing code at 11 but the only screens I was on until double digits was playing video games a few hours a week under parental supervision. Even that didn’t start until I was 7

all you can do really is to teach to beware. reckon doing so won't just help with ads, but the internet in general. that "cute gal" messaging you may just be looking to butcher a pig.

> All energy drinks are sugar water Caffeine is bad for health People who drink those are addicts

wtf? how is this even related?

> If online exposure is hard from 5 years or above, there should be some level of ads education from 5 years itself

maybe we shouldnt advertise to children? my kid shouldnt need "ad literacy" while theyre learning their "abc's"

It's less "People who drink those are addicts" and more "we've designed this product to make it more addicting to a certain subset of people who are statistically likely to become addicted to products like these"

> one of the most avid groups of social media users?

Are they spending much?

Anecdotal, but my Gen Z and his friends abhor and avoid FB/IG like the plague. From my perspective, FB is rapidly losing the interests of the younger generations and increasingly looking like a right-wing retirement community.

Do we have a reliable source of user data that shows the breakdown of each social media platform by age group?

I don't. wouldn't the ad itself have to be harmful to mental health?

maybe if it was for plastic surgery. or if Kim K did a sponsored post for diet tea

Sure, if you equate an ad for a new Mario game for Nintendo Switch with deceptive mobile game ads featuring pregnant Spiderman and Elsa in sexually charged poses, I can see that.

That seems like it would require the damage done to be equivalent to the cost of an ad (which can fluctuate wildly).

That seems unlikely. I'm not going to get into if it would be higher or lower, but both of those seem way more likely than equivalency.

> I see that as eleven billion dollars of damage done to the mental health of children.

I will take the over on that number.

I will also suggest that the number is even larger for a similarly-sized cohort of working adults (especially younger working adults).

The tv didn’t track your movement through stores and websites and our other online activities.

In countries with disposable income, kids have been a huge market. Christmas comes every year, and so do birthdays, and the birthdays of friends.

When I was a kid, Super Soakers printed money. Every kid wanted one, and the bigger the super soaker the cooler the kid.

Does no one remember Tickle Me Elmo? Or Furby?

Now days it may be roboblox gift cards, but the cash is still flowing.

$11B is a small portion of total social media advertising revenue, so it probably doesn't work as well as you think.

I fall for this one more as an adult who's shopping while completely crashed and still needs to drive home and cook dinner.

> I suppose these days that would be considered child abuse :-/

I suppose you could find someone who believes this, but it sounds more like sour grapes and doesn’t add anything to the comment except an eye roll at an entire generation. We can all do better than throwaway comments like this one.

I'll vouch and reply because I feel your comment may be in earnest.

Historically, in the US, there have been strict limits on what ads are allowed around children's TV. There has to be a distinction between the TV show and the ads. For example kids TV shows in the US used to (not sure about now) have a very distinct break saying that the show was going to be back soon, indicating that what followed wasn't part of the show.

There is also a difference in that 20 years ago, if a kid wanted to buy a toy, they had to see an ad on TV that happened to be for a toy they wanted and then convince their parent to go to the store and buy that toy.

Now with targeted ads and IAP, kids are being targeted directly to buy shiny goods for games that they play. Cosmetic upgrades in the more "honest" games that bestow social status between peers, or gacha tokens in pay to win games to get needed items/characters to progress. (And some games combine the worst of both!)

Targeting a child with an ad for a game they play gets insidious very quickly. "Hey Timmy, did you know all your friends are laughing behind your back because you don't have the latest and greatest armor upgrade? Better buy it now!"

Those ads cannot cater their content and their timing towards your vulnerabilities based on behavior analytics, such as metadata indicating that you might be depressed, going through a breakup, etc. An app can shoot varied content at you and determine that if you view happy cat content, then enraging political discourse, then sexual stimulating content, and then and ad, you're more likely to click on the ad, or stare at it for longer, etc.

Social media ads are essentially interactive, but their mechanics are hidden and there's no winning state for the player.

And just to play with dark ideas: what exactly (besides technological limitations) would stop any of the big companies from basically running a long social experiment to determine whether, over years, you can shape a kid to become an adult that's a big consumer?

An ad on TV has no information on who you are when you view it. An ad on SM has detailed information of who you were years ago, who you are now, and there's no reason why it can't make predictions about who you'll be based on the growing data. Nor is there a reason not to try to shape that to their benefit.

Like a lot of things, I expect the only difference is time and space. There are adult generations where large swaths don’t remember Saturday morning cartoons now. If you’re a millennial with tech savvy parents you may have grown up with streaming entertainment only. Though today ads can show up there as well, so maybe this will be another way where children and grandparents bond over things the parents don’t understand.