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What If We Made Advertising Illegal?

simone.org

What If We Made Advertising Illegal?

The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn't been valid for decades.

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What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
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282 comments

  • I'm just going to take this opportunity to remind everyone that you can and should donate to your Mastodon and Lemmy instances, even if it's just $5 a month. That's how we band together to keep these platforms ad-free, and I don't know about you all, but I love that my mind isn't being manipulated here.

  • That'd be great, but the "how" is a much harder question. What counts as advertising? Because there's a reason Google, Meta, etc. have their fingers in so many different industries: every single thing that gets attention could be leveraged for advertising, even the act of suppressing mentions of competitors.

    Should I be able to say "X product has been great, I recommend it!" Only if I'm not being paid, you say? How could you possibly know?

    As discussed in the article, "propaganda" is illegal. So any discussion about how terrible trump is would also be illegal. Propaganda doesn't mean false, it just means it's trying to convince you of something. An advertisement. Heck, the article itself could be considered a form of advertising for legislation.

    It's just so trivial of a concept to say, but the moment you spend any amount of time thinking about it, it falls apart. It's like trying to ban the Ship of Theseus from a club.

    • That'd be great, but the "how" is a much harder question.

      As with the implementation of any obvious law, of course.

      What counts as advertising? Because there's a reason Google, Meta, etc. have their fingers in so many different industries: every single thing that gets attention could be leveraged for advertising, even the act of suppressing mentions of competitors.

      Sure, maybe that's an interesting question.

      After all television commercials and magazine inserts and pop up ads and billboards are gone we can start debating the nuance of where exactly the line is drawn.

      Should I be able to say "X product has been great, I recommend it!" Only if I'm not being paid, you say?

      Correct!

      How could you possibly know?

      You would have to report that income on your taxes and if you ever get audited and that was a substantial amount of your income they will find out and go after the major players who are profiting off it illegally at tax time.

      Think about gambling or alcohol. How do we know you aren't selling unlicensed alcohol or running an unlicensed casino? We still have laws despite the uncertainty.

      As discussed in the article, "propaganda" is illegal. So any discussion about how terrible trump is would also be illegal.

      I feel like you're confused about the difference between speech and propaganda. Discussion about Trump isn't propaganda.

      I know we currently do not, but it is possible to treat an individual and a business/corporation differently.

      It is possible to hold an organizations speech to different standards than an individual.

      The discussion of outlawing propaganda doesn't have to have anything to do with your individual ability to express your opinion up until the point you try to organize and artificially broadcast that speech wider than you could on your own.

      • So, first off, any content made to change your mind is propaganda. Doesn't matter how true or false it is, doesn't matter if it's cherry-picking info, doesn't matter if it doesn't make any claims at all, doesn't matter if it's paid for by a state or a religious group or a single individual. And it HAS to be defined this way, because there does not exist an impartial arbitrating party to draw a distinction for us. If we try to limit it only to information meant to mislead, then we have to figure out who decides whether something is misleading.

        A poster that just says "hang in there" or "just give up" can be used as propaganda if you post it all over the place to raise or lower morale. It's not making any claims, it's not pushing a certain brand, it's just trying to change what you think about. That's propaganda.

        Second, this whole thing assumes no one ever wants to see an advertisement. But if you're arguing honestly, the reality is that sometimes you do. You want to know your favorite band is playing downtown. You want to know that the roofing company across town that does good work even exists. You want to know about whatever new silly product was made that aligns with your hobbies. In order to have an honest conversation, we need to agree that not all advertising is unwanted.

        all television commercials and magazine inserts and pop up ads and billboards are gone we can start debating the nuance of where exactly the line is drawn

        Would PSAs be banned? Those are nothing if not propaganda. How about billboards advertising a religious group? What if I buy a magazine because it does a great job at making me aware of products I actually do often want to buy?

        You would have to report that income on your taxes

        And what if I benefit in an indirect, difficult way to trace outside of being paid? Or what if it's MY company?

        know we currently do not, but it is possible to treat an individual and a business/corporation differently...It is possible to hold an organizations speech to different standards than an individual.

        As a small business owner, how do I make customers aware that I exist?

        until the point you try to organize and artificially broadcast that speech wider than you could on your own.

        Where is that line? We've invented so many things that amplify our speech wider than what we could do "on our own". A megaphone reaches more people than if I yell. A 10ft sign in my yard reaches more people than a tshirt. A social media account with 1 million followers reaches people than 1000 followers reaches more than 10 followers. Should I be able to make a flyer? Should I be able to use a printing press to copy that flyer? Should i be able to nail copes of that flyer all over the door of the catholic church and start a Reformation? Where is the line?

        (It's also worth reading up on the history of advertising in television in the UK. The idea of creating legislation to limit the prevalence of advertising is not new, and neither are the methods used to work around them.)

        In summary, this is a very hard problem, but...I think the solution could be solved democratically. I don't think the solution lies in trying to rigorously define what constitutes an ad, only for the form of an ad to morph. Rather, it lies in disincentivizing people seeing unwanted ads in the first place. The fact that people look around and see ads they don't want to see needs to be translated directly into some kind of proportional tax.

        Ex. If you poll the people, and they say "I see too many McDonalds ads" then the people (i.e. govt) should penalize McDonalds proportionally. If we poll again, and the penalty doesn't result in people reporting seeing fewer unwanted McDonalds ads, then increase the penalty. When the penalty is high enough, it won't be worth it for McDonalds to run so many aggressive ads, and they'll have to reduce advertising in order for the people to report fewer unwanted ads in order for the penalty to drop. That's the only possible implementation I see as actually working.

    • The phrase "ban advertising" is reductive. Different countries have different laws around ads. For example, anime shows have bumpers in them because in Japan they are required by law to clearly indicate when advertising starts and stops.

      There's also laws against billboards, against targeting children, against specific industries, and limiting the amount of advertising available. I could see laws against targeted ads like Meta uses being implemented as well.

    • What counts as advertising?

      Let's say you ban ad breaks on TV / streams. In the early days of radio and TV they didn't have ad breaks, the host of the show would just go on for a while about his favourite brand of cigarettes. In the modern world, pretty much any time you see a name brand in a TV show or movie, it's because they've been paid for product placement.

      So... you could solve that by never allowing the mentioning of any brand name in any form of media. That would make reviews illegal. That's fair, I suppose, because reviews are definitely seen as a form of advertising. That's why companies often provide review copies of things for free to journalists in the hope they might talk/write about them. Maybe you could carve out an exception allowing a brand and model to be mentioned if there are safety issues or product recalls?

      Ok, so now you have a Formula 1 event, it's on TV but you have to pay for that broadcast because it's not ad supported. The cars, of course, don't have any ads on them. But, are they allowed to have the manufacturer's name and logo on them? Is it advertising if say Ferrari puts a lot of money into F1, wins a lot, and so when you watch the news you see Ferrari-red cars with Ferrari logos winning a race? Also, could the drivers wear coveralls with the Ferrari logo on them? What about fans of Ferrari, could they wear a shirt with the Ferrari logo on them if they were simply fans of the brand? What if this supposed Ferrari fan were a supermodel? Does someone have to carefully go through the finances of any very attractive person to see if they're ever wearing a logo not because they're a fan but because they've been compensated?

      I'm in favour of reducing the amount of advertising we see. I think it's a bit absurd now. But, while it's possible to tax it or regulate it, I think it would be very hard to completely eliminate it.

  • Took a trip to Cuba, one of the first things I noticed was lack of billboards and advertising in general. It was quite refreshing.

    • Another example of that is Pyongyang. They do have billboards to Kim Jong Un, and memorials to Kim Jong Il. But, for the most part the city is free of billboards. It's really strange if you're used to modern western cities.

  • Lets try it and see what happens. No advertising seems like a reasonable response to advertising everywhere all the time.

282 comments