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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

Ads and media are generally exploitative and manipulative, even if not targeted specifically at anybody.

3 years after the nation of Fiji received its first television broadcasts in 1995, dieting and disordered eating went from unheard of to double digit percentages among teenage girls.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/world/study-finds-tv-alte...

> Before 1995, Dr. Becker said, there was little talk of dieting in Fiji. ''The idea of calories was very foreign to them.'' But in the 1998 survey, 69 percent said that at some time they had been on a diet. In fact, preliminary data suggest more teen-age girls in Fiji diet than their American counterparts.

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People will comment all day on the ethics and legality of advertising yet they never seem to stop and think how ads even work. Ads work primarily through increasing the subconscious familiarity over a competitor product’s subconscious familiarity. The vast majority of ads are meant to influence you through completely unconscious processes. The “get to know a product you didn’t know about before” part likely doesn’t even account for %1 of advertising. If the reverse was true, you would never see a single ad of Coca-Cola since everybody on the planet knows about it already.

It boggles my mind to no end that today’s society collectively accepts literally being manipulated against their free will. See the post https://hackernoon.com/nobody-is-immune-to-ads-7142a4245c2c

It's not as binary as in all forms of advertising are equally evil. As much as manipulative as traditional media advertising was/is, targeted advertising is easily orders of magnitude worse, and a good place for regulation to start if we wish to improve anything.

I mean as of 2011 over half the native women are obese [1]. I don’t know what to make of it other than that’s a lot. Dr. Anne Becker may be really into preserving traditional Fijian culture or whatever but it sounds like some of the local girls don’t want to anymore.

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26201444/

The introduction of body shaming media vs. actually improving obesity rates is pretty poorly correlated. Introducing anorexia, bulimia, and now bigorexia to a population is probably neutral or net negative.

If it wasn’t, you would have expected those rates to decline after the introduction of media informing people.

I don't know, it works in Japan.

One out of 190+ countries would be a poor correlation indeed.

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