[nickelcitymario]

I generally get downvoted hard when I raise my hand as an advertiser, but here goes.

I think scapegoating advertising is a mistake, because I think we're missing the real problem.

Yes, advertising can and often is unethical and harmful. I can't speak for other advertisers, but I take ethics very seriously. I don't participate in advertising aimed at making problems seem bigger than they are for the sake of selling a product. It's effective (in terms of sales), but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did that.

But: What exactly changed about advertising around 2010 if we're going to say advertising is responsible for a radical decrease in mental health since that time?

On balance, I don't think advertisers today are less ethical than they ever were. The same bad actors exist. There are more laws today to prevent the worst abuses, but there are still ways to legally manipulate the public that I would consider horribly unethical.

Yes, we have access to more data. But from my perspective, I haven't seen data used effectively for much more than targeting, i.e. prioritizing ad budgets towards the people most likely interested in your product. It still makes me uncomfortable, but can that alone impact mental health at these levels? I don't think so.

And so my problem with scapegoating advertising isn't that it's unfair to advertisers. We deserve a lot of the vitriol sent our way. My problem with it is that if we're wrong in our diagnosis, the real problem(s) remain unchecked.

The vast majority of the people I know in advertising didn't want all this data in the first place. We were happy to just work on creative ideas, to try and paint a product in a new light so that the general public would take notice.

What changed is social media, and the social media companies themselves. I truly believe the problem is with engagement metrics and all the crap they do to keep people addicted. Advertisers, in turn, are forced to play the game, because it's the only game in town. If you're not advertising on social media, you might as well not exist. And if you don't play the engagement game, you might as well not be on there at all. It's a trap.

That's not to say there's no one in advertising who is genuinely content to do harm. They exist. They've always existed. But they didn't, and couldn't have, created the platforms and the algorithms that multiplied the problem since 2010.

Further, when I look at my own use on social media, the most toxic content isn't sponsored content or ads, it's stuff that's gone viral by content creators and political actors. It's "recommended content" that should have been flagged as wildly inappropriate rather than promoted for more engagement. Saying the problem is advertising misses all of that horrible stuff.

So again, not trying to say advertising is good for the soul. Not saying it's a net positive for society (although I think whether or not it's a positive has more to do with WHAT is being advertised than the act of advertising in it of itself).

But let's not mistake advertising as the cause of the mental health crisis, at least not without solid evidence to back that up. I don't think the evidence in the original post would support that conclusion at all.

[hattmall]

I think what changed, which is pretty easy to identify is an increased invasiveness in placement and format of advertising.

Advertisements in the past had always been fairly simple to ignore. Billboards, commercial breaks, and print or even radio ads were disconnected from the content.

Today ads are in many cases often indistinguishable, even if labeled from content.

Facebook ads look like regular posts, and many ads ARE regular posts. A fitness podcast talking about their sponsors product with the same tone and passion as the content or simply being paid to influence on a product.

Everyone pretty universally used to recognize and be annoyed by commercials and pay little attention to ads.

Now, especially young people, can barely even recognize ads. Especially those done by so called influencers which are just part of the regular content flow.

Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.

That's a huge change.

[nickelcitymario]

That type of content has always existed, though. They were called advertorials. Endless books going back to at least the 40s advocated making ads look as similar to regular content as possible for the very effect you're describing.

So I'm not arguing that that's not a bad thing. It is a bad thing, in my opinion. Anything that's done to deceive the audience in any way is unethical.

I'm saying it's not new, and certainly didn't suddenly take off in 2010. It's been a mainstay in mass media for almost as long mass media has existed.

Further, what Facebook has done is treat all ads the same as regular content. That's not something advertisers chose to do; it's something Facebook chose to do. Blaming advertisers for a decision they had no part in is missing the mark.

To be clear, I think many advertisers are probably pretty happy with what Facebook did there. But that's not the same as the advertisers being responsible for that decision. Facebook did it because it led to more clicks and therefore more revenue for Facebook. Same thing with how Google has progressively made search ads nearly indistinguishable from regular search results. Advertisers didn't do that. Google did. Advertisers didn't decide to make the first 75% of results on Amazon be sponsored or promoted products. Amazon did that themselves.

> Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.

They're media companies, not advertisers. They sell advertising, as virtually all media companies do (with exception for publicly funded or high-subscription-fee companies). Advertisers buy advertising space.

So if your argument is that Google, Amazon, and Facebook are making advertising worse, I agree. If your argument is that advertisers (the people buying the ads) are making things worse, and that this correlates to the drop in mental health, I don't completely discount the theory; but I'd need to see a lot more evidence to support that contention.