[busymom0]

I think there is a thin line between ethical advertising and unethical psychological manipulation. I think generally, people know that when they are watching an ad, they are being tricked a bit. I think as long as it’s obvious to the user that they are being advertised to, there shouldn’t be an issue. Cambridge Analytica data was used to manipulate people by them not being aware that they were basically watching an advertisement. Except in this case, the ad was a real time political movie in the same theatre as someone else but both people somehow came out watching a different version of the movie because of filtered and targeted manipulative ads. They did not know that the posts they were seeing on social media were supposed to be manipulative ads.

[sgift]

> I think there is a thin line between ethical advertising and unethical psychological manipulation.

That line runs between "let's think about this as an interesting thought experiment" and "let's do this!" - People can and are manipulated even when they know they are being advertised. That has been shown time and time again. Advertising is psychological manipulation with another name.

[busymom0]

Sure. My following question would be how do we then differentiate between healthy advertising an unhealthy one?

We can't abandon and block ads completely. If we did that, we wouldn't even get to be aware of products which might really make our lives better. How do we figure out the healthy balance out? I would argue that the current laws around advertising are pretty decent but they could be made better and adapted for social media platforms.