[avalys]

Do grocery stores “capitalize on vulnerability” when they place name-brand products at eye level?

Do carmakers “capitalize on vulnerability” when they advertise pickup trucks as big tough vehicles for tough, outdoorsy men?

Do providers of health insurance for pets “capitalize on vulnerability” when they say you need to buy their product if you love your pet?

At some point people need to be responsible for their own decisions. And I can’t get that worked up about Meta’s free product.

[quacked]

Yes, yes, and yes. However, the three situations you named are targeting adults. Children and teenagers are worth insulating from the full might of advertisers, propagandists, and always-on virtual social circles.

[ff317]

Arguably, adults are worth protecting as well. A lot of marketing and even design intent for adult products is also extremely misleading and intentionally designed to prey on our collective fallibility. In that sense, it's at the very least unethical, and maybe should be illegal. We have some laws about truth-in-advertising, but they're very weak in a lot of scenarios.

[quacked]

I agree with you. I believe that one of the greatest problems American society faces is a corruption of public life on the terms of advertisers and propagandists, who are often the same people. However, I don't have a great solution for imposing a censorship regime on content generation and consumption, and so it is a little more helpful to simply choose an age at which to draw the line where the law treats you as capable of making your own decisions and protecting yourself from mass media.

[Arson9416]

What are you thinking about specifically? Some examples might help others see your perspective better.

[mandmandam]

Wow, really? Name anything heavily advertised on corporate media.

Insurance, defense contractors, pharmaceuticals, home security systems, cars, body spray, McDonalds, Coke, politicians; it's all fear, status, greed. It's explicitly taking advantage of our vulnerabilities with every combination of precision and blunt force, to sell pointless, stupid, toxic shit. Put on your They Live sunglasses. The planet is burning.

Let's advertise carrots on TV. Let's advertise public transport, and public healthcare. Let's advertise free fucking college.

[hf67]

Even Adults are fucked when info explodes. Cuz there are upper limits to what a 3 inch chimp brain can do.

It's been studied under so many different names Knowledge Gap Theory, Info Asymmetry, Bounded Rationality etc The more info Adults have to digest, bad decisions/exploitation are garaunteed.

[AmericanChopper]

I would argue that it is the responsibility of parents to decide how to do that. But if you want a legislative solution, there already is one (COPPA) which prevents people under the age of 13 from joining social media.

If you think those legal protections aren’t fit for purpose (they were created long before social media even existed), then you should take that up with your legislators. I personally wouldn’t trust them to approach that task without implementing something horribly tyrannical, like implementing a requirement for a full KYC process for creating social media accounts. So I’d advise that you be careful what you ask for in that respect.

[ryandrake]

> But if you want a legislative solution, there already is one (COPPA) which prevents people under the age of 13 from joining social media.

Nothing (besides parents) can prevent people under the age of 13 from joining social media. The kids just lie about their age. Everyone knows how to lie about their age to get something they want, from the time they're in kindergarten.

[AmericanChopper]

And I’d suggest that’s absolutely the way you want it to be. The consequences of pushing a full blown KYC regime on all social media are pretty dystopian.

The value COPPA does provide is as a tool parents can use. If they report their underage children’s social media accounts, they will be removed. But of course they still have to actually do the parenting, which is how it should be. I think you shouldn’t want government to takeover those responsibilities for them.

[alakin]

Are children and young adults banned from selecting products based on marketing inside stores?

[Teever]

Canada has forbidden the sale of cigarettes in grocery stores, and they've banned the display of any advertising for them in the stores that are still allowed to sell them.

[Manuel_D]

Sure, because cigarettes have clear and unambiguous harms to health.

What makes advertising, I dunno, a remote controlled plane to a kid so much more unethical than advertising it to an adult?

[quacked]

You know, children's advertising in the 1980s and 1990s was heavily researched by psychologists and economists with the explicit goal of manipulating the emotional state of children to get them to bother their parents for toy purchases. I don't have any books or articles off the top of my head, but I've read several articles and analyses of how the pacing, pitch, and coloring of advertisements intended for children were designed to be as stimulating and upsetting as possible. There was also research put into when during the day and year you could play these commercials to the greatest effect, and the advertising slots at certain times were priced higher in response to this.

It is possible that this doesn't harm children. However, the deliberate injection of emotional manipulation and disunity into families with young children in order to stimulate the purchase of toys doesn't strike me as particularly good for the nation, and I don't know that I would have to think very hard about my decision if given the option to prevent it using the law.

[Teever]

I think we're in agreement that we should regulate advertising for things that are harmful for children.

[bilbo0s]

Here is the issue of with these kinds of things, where does it end?

Do tv shows target teens too much with high energy music and dancing?

Does media target them too closely with intentionally addictive music riffs from Taylor Swift to Billy Eilish?

Will we shut down all these video games that clearly target kids with bright colors and, let's call it what it is, "aestheticized violence"?

We need to be careful about how we go about trying to protect children in this regard.

[quacked]

Yes, I agree that enforcement of moral norms requires setting arbitrary limits on behavior that aren't necessarily objectively defensible. Every law and ban regarding the dissemination of goods and services involves a slightly illogical compromise between a partially elected moral authority and the citizenry.

There isn't really a clear answer to your questions about whether or not "we" would continue to censor video games, popular media, and TV shows if limits were introduced about what minors can see on the internet. It would depend on the compromise reached between the citizenry and the enforcement agency that tasked with enforcing the bans. In some regards, I feel that American life is far too censored and supervised, but in others I feel that it is far too liberated and unrestricted. I happen to believe that there should be more content limitations on entertainment and social media, and less content limitations on political speech. If I were ever to meet with a large group of people who shared my beliefs, we would probably take political action to enforce our will for society.

I suppose that doesn't really prove or disprove your assertion that censorship laws would inevitably lead to more extreme censorship, but I think it's important to recognize that there are already many and forced censorship laws in the US, and altering them isn't really the craziest thing.

[bdzr]

Ironically, many cereals are placed at eye level of children.

[megaman821]

Are you saying the cereal boxes on display at grocery stores are mostly targeting adults?

[lokar]

At least it’s in the real world where you have to be physically present, and exposure is limited.

If you want to talk about kids cereal the real issue are TV ads pretending to be cartoons. A subject that has generated considerable concern, debate and state action over the years.

[aaroninsf]

At some point,

we as a society are going to have to seriously engage the fact that we are now fully capable of manufacturing addiction, and at the moment, do so, both in adults and in children.

"Their own decisions" is not a stable concept. Setting aside esoteric philosophy of mind, you need look no further than your own relationship to your phone—tested out for many of us at the Thanksgiving table last week, as duly noted by Chris Ware's cover of last week's New Yorker magazine—to confirm this.

The mechanisms of surveillance captialism and a foundation of decades of consumer psychology (etc ad nausuem) have quite literally left us adrift in a world of stochastic mind control. At that same table many of us encountered the inexplicable world views of relatives whose propoganda bubbles did not intersect our own.

And we all have such bubbles, not least as a result of the cheerful professionalism of many who browse here.

Your decisions, just like teenagers' decisions, are not "your own" in the sense someone might have meant c. 1923. And before one cries, it has ever been thus, to that I say: no, it absolutely has not. The technologies for behavioral steering of today are as unalike what people contended with in advertising (etc.) a hundred years ago, as our logistic transport and energy industries are, amongst others.

Until we take this on, head on, as a society, the problem will just get worse.

[BizarreByte]

> At some point people need to be responsible for their own decisions.

You're asking this of a group that largely can't vote, sign contracts, and which America doesn't trust to drink.

I can get worked up about Meta targeting children in ways which they don't have the experience, or knowledge to know about let alone to avoid. Children should be protected from bad actors like Meta and let me be clear, any company taking advantage of kids is a bad actor.

[richardwhiuk]

Companies take advantage of kids all the time - there's a huge history of this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_to_children

The entire toy unboxing industry is built around advertising to children.

[switchbak]

Do grocery stores “capitalize on vulnerability” when they ... place junk food at the checkout line to capitalize on your impulsiveness when you're least able to defend against it?

Yes.

You can be expected to make responsible decisions as an adult. That doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors trying to take advantage of you, and that this behaviour isn't borderline unethical.

[ff317]

I should make responsible decisions as an adult, but it's still fair to call that grocery store's actions unethical, and that maybe they should be regulated if they can't be ethical on their own.

[lotsofpulp]

Can you define exactly what is unethical about displaying candy in the checkout line?

Should nothing be there? Only healthy vegetables? Is it unethical to sell things with added sugar in the first place? Or a certain amount of sugar per volume period?

[ff317]

The whole sugar/candy industry is unethical in my mind. It may take some decades for society to catch up, but eventually eating sugar the way we do today will be seen like smoking and the tobacco industry.

[lotsofpulp]

Why not extend this to basically everything not essential to life? Traveling to tropical destinations is clearly harmful for the world, living in big homes spaced out from each other is another one that causes unnecessary pollution. Selling alcohol, foods high in saturated fat (butter), etc.

[hotnfresh]

If one course of action that does not even add more options of products to buy, just pushes them in a different way, contributes to worse health outcomes across a population, and you know it’s doing so, yes, that’s super unethical.

[lotsofpulp]

Targets have a Starbucks selling 10x as much dissolved sugar 25 feet away from checkout aisles. Are those unethical? How about in a separate Starbucks building, but on a pad site in front of the store with a drive thru?

Seems like an arbitrary place to draw the unethical/ethical line.

[hotnfresh]

This is not, cannot be, and shouldn’t be math. Yes, it’s all “arbitrary”. Unhealthy impulse-items at the checkout are going to be regarded as quite unethical, by a lot of people, for really obvious reasons. The approaches you’re trying to use to “disprove” that isn’t how any of this works.

Many things are bad. Some are worse than others. Ones that are intentionally manipulative, as the impulse-buy aisle is, and greedily pushing high-margin products that are also unhealthy? Yeah, that’s an extremely shitty thing to do, no matter how common. The motivation is 100% greed, not delivering a better experience (as simply making candy and soda available in some normal aisle might). And in the Year of Our Lord 2023, every person choosing to create impulse-buy areas knows exactly what they’re doing and the effects it has.

The Starbucks bottles in the checkout aisle are, similarly, bad. The Starbucks that you have to walk over to, look at the menu with calories printed right next to each item while you choose what to buy, then stand in a second line, check out again, then wait at to get the drink, isn’t bad in the same ways. It might be bad in different ways, and to a different degree! But it’s not the same, and you’re not going to be able to construct some proof that requires I condemn those equally or else condemn neither, because that’s nonsense both in the specific terms of what we’re writing about, and also because it’s not a useful way to analyze or discuss these sorts of things in general.

[kelseyfrog]

Using people as a means to an end qualifies here and is generally considered unethical.

[lotsofpulp]

I don't understand what "using people as a means to an end" means here. Sounds like selling something to people to earn money, but that would describe all business.

[kelseyfrog]

Using people as a means is a reference to Kant[1].

> that would describe all business.

What if it does? Should we avoid an honest conclusion because it has profound consequences?

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/persons-means/

[JumpCrisscross]

> At some point people need to be responsible for their own decisions

This is like saying “everything in moderation” in a discussion about nutrition. No shit. We’re trying to find that delineation.

[Kapura]

>At some point people need to be responsible for their own decisions.

That point should come when they are no longer children. Targeting children to produce perfect little ecosystem consumers is... kinda evil.

[Levitz]

>And I can’t get that worked up about Meta’s free product.

There is no "Free" product. You are paying with freedom, you are paying with attention, you are paying with privacy. It's not "free", it's extracting value from you.

It doesn't cost money, yes, but neither does working, yet we assume that transfer of value is such that it ought to be paid for. It's not Meta offering a "free" product. It's their users. Their users give Meta their data for "free", which then Meta uses for profit.

[maximinus_thrax]

> At some point people need to be responsible for their own decisions.

We already do that. When they turn 18, we expect people to be responsible for their own decisions.

[hotnfresh]

One normal human with 24 hours in a day losing 45ish hours a week to pull median income and another 8ish per day to sleep versus multibillion dollar companies hiring behavioral psychologists and marketing experts with collectively many thousands of hours per day spent finding ways to trick people—and their efforts demonstrably work.

The advertising industry’s a rabid dog the size of Godzilla and should be put down, whether it’s targeting kids or adults.

[marcosdumay]

Not only I'll add to the choir of people answering "yes" to all those 3, but if any of those act in a way capable of redefining the reality people live in, they should be outlawed. Even if they are targeting adults.

Marketing gets a lot of freedom because of the assumption that they only take over a small part of the information a person has access to. To the extent that this assumption becomes incorrect, those actions become attacks.

[AlexandrB]

Yes to all of the above? Advertising is a nasty industry and should be tightly controlled.

[LeroyRaz]

There are a great number of regulations placed on products (and their advertising) to ensure customers are informed and protected.

Examples: Drinking disclaimers (drink responsibly). Cigarette disclaimers and off putting mandated packet visuals. The traffic light system in the UK (which displays a colour coded breakdown warning of unhealthy food macros on the front of all ready meals). Alcoholic beverages by law having to specify their alcohol percentages. Foods by law having to specify their nutritional content and ingredients.

All of these regulations have been introduced to ensure customers are not blind to unhealthy choices (e.g., the traffic light system warning against high sugar content designed to make cheap addictive food). While not always effective, I believe that on balance these regulations make society a better place to live in. Similarly one could envision mandated social media disclaimers and warnings, and to regulate this way would be entirely within the wider norm, rather than something unusual.

[skeaker]

Yes, yes, and yes. Advertising is almost always malicious. The days of it being primarily small businesses getting the word out about themselves are long over. Advertising firms now have actual psychologists that study ways to best exploit the brain of the common man, and that is wrong.

[kibwen]

Hear hear. It's bizarre to see people like the parent commenter who are so unthinkingly accustomed to abusive and manipulative advertisements that they mistake its perversity for normalcy.

[rightbyte]

When I grew up in the 90s you kinda wanted ads. Otherwise you wouldn't know what was being shown at the theaters etc. People put up "No ads but Cineama ads and the phone catalogue" on their mailboxes etc. I believe many peoples perception of the world does not change from their childhood. At least very slowly.

Ads stopped being useful about 20 years ago by now and like 10 (?) years ago they started to spy on us.