[ashtonbaker]

Thanks for expanding. I agree with your delineation between raising awareness or convincing, I think. I don't think it's the most helpful way to understand ads and their potential for harm. There's another way to categorize ads - maybe orthogonal - based on whether they are presented as part of an advertising network or not. There's a fundamental difference between showing a box on a shelf and buying ads on a billboard. Or perhaps the line should be drawn at targeted ads. It's of course possible to show benign "we exist" ads via Facebook ads, or political disinformation ads in a newspaper, but it seems to me that certain methods of advertising are obviously more conducive to harmful, manipulative ads.

Also (and this is more radical), I do think it's a legitimate to want to unsubscribe, even from "we exist" ads. Attention is valuable, it shouldn't be considered an inalienable right to sneak anything you want into my consciousness for the purposes of selling. Even if you accept that it's not a zero-sum game. I recognize that this is not the status quo at all currently, but it's the feeling behind comments like the above.