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None of these points seem correct to me. For instance, the "launch a better product" argument. Most of the time, the thing preventing a better product from entering is that they have to overcome their competition's advertising budget. If no one was allowed to advertise, evaluations of products would necessarily be more honest, and I expect that products would be better, not worse, for it. As a value signal to investors, I don't know how you could possibly disentangle the benefits from the economies of scale from either of the effects that you're talking about, both the attraction of investors in the first place, or the relative bloat of their advertising budgets. Seems like a non-argument to me, but maybe "some economists" are right. If you are convincing people of things that are true, it's done through a combination of science and democracy. If you perform a (preregistered) study and then accept the results, that's not lying, and if people review your products autonously, you haven't paid them at all. And as far as internet content creators are concerned, Building up a following expressly so that you can cash out on your credibility with them is a huge manifestation of the problem. If anything, the ability to do this has almost completely depleted the internet of new good content. Basically what you've described is a pay to play model, where the only way that people can make content is if they can get paid to make it. Which means that the only content that exists is content that an advertiser wants to see. These are just independent contractor advertisers. Content is completely incidental to the model. You've clearly put a lot of thought into why you should not have to admit that advertising is bad, but you haven't gone so far as to actually deny the statement that advertising is lying for money, or that a society built on lying for money is bad. |