[skybrian]

We should distinguish between techniques used and how they're applied. It's possible to use advertising to:

1) Sell soap. 2) Let people know about a new movie. 3) Scam people out of their life savings (find people who fall for a Nigerian prince scam). 4) Own devices (phishing). 5) Swing undecided, low-information voters in an election.

The techniques may be quite similar. The consequences, very different.

Ad tech is powerful technology that doesn't discriminate. Large advertising networks do have content policies preventing outright scammers, phishing, and often just things they don't want on their network, but there are always new techniques.

So this is just another example of why we can't have a nice libertarian-inspired Internet like we all dreamed of when the Internet was new. There are always bad guys and gray areas. Any popular service that attracts a large enough audience gets abused and the service providers inevitably end up policing it, so then they start making tough policy decisions about what's okay. (Or if they don't, customers and various interest groups will complain.)