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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.