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What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
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this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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It's also a form free market distortion that actual economic conservatives should hate.
Rather than having firms compete for who can make the best product or service, advertising instead lets them compete based on who can best psychologically manipulate the population en masse.
It's a "rich get richer" mechanic that any halfway competent dev would've patched out for balance reasons a long time ago.
It's also such a funny contradiction: a big part of the free market model rests on the idea that well informed consumers can vote with their wallet, which should reward good businesses and punish bad ones. Yet it is very difficult to argue consumers have ever been informed enough to make this work, which is in large part due to advertising flooding communication channels with noise, and also because it is unreasonable to expect a consumer to be fully informed for the hundreds of purchases they make on a daily basis.
You cannot get away from advertising, ever, in any society, in any financial system, at any point of time in history after tribal societie.
It's a concept that you can't just "ban", nearly all the problems we have with it today is because it's uncontrolled and abused. The concept itself though is as unbannable as the concept of "selling" something.
The concept:
Is literally as old as humans moving away from tribal societies.
You can make the best thing in the world, but if no one knows about it, it's still useless.
It's already been done. Sao Paolo Brazil banned all outdoor advertisements.
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/
No they didn't that's not banning advertising but that's regulating a specific type of advertising.
There's a pretty big difference.
And if you have the name of your business and what you sell on your store front? That's advertising. Or a card with your name on it to hand out to customers or coupons. That's advertising. Or logos on clothing or a sign that sits near the road that says SALE. That is advertising.
OP was downvoted for saying the truth, regulation is important, but businesses will fail if they have no way to catch your interest.
In fact it gets worse because small businesses will never be seen because nobody will have heard of them and everyone goes to the big store everyone already knows about.
There is balance to be had....
Lemmy is essentially just like Reddit at this point. It's just a bunch of the lowest common denominator circle jerking a lack of critical thinking.
You cannot have intelligent discussion, and group think is all that matters. Folks will not read your comment, they will find the single phrase they disagree with and hold onto it for dear life, missing the entire point.
And then ignore the whole premise and idea behind the discussion and reply in a way that makes absolutely no sense if they had average reading comprehension....
I miss the old Internet, where you could actually have discussions and pass ideas back and forth.
This is a new phenomenon here in my experience, the cynic in me says this is ad companies trying to control and shut down the conversation as Lemmy grows. Better to have your opposition not have a realistic and feasible route to their goals.
It reminds me of how close the US was to actual police reform before all the discussion became "defund the police entirely" like that was going to just suddenly fix everything and cause no other problems. Then the whole movement just basically evaporated.
Lmao, this is absolute defeatist nonsense.
"You've gotta help us doc, we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
Because here's the thing, you literally just can ban advertising. Ban billboards, ban tv Ads, ban social media advertising.
You can still have companies publish information about their product, but that's not what advertising is in the context of this discussion.
Right there are plenty of ways for businesses to get consumers to choose to use their product other than advertising which are far more conducive to consumers being able to make an informed purchase decision without being manipulated. But doing so would upend the existing power structures of who gets to sell more product, so disturbing the status quo just requires more political will than anybody really has.
You can find ads for products in Roman republic era graffiti. We have had ads for thousands of years.
Graffiti, you say? So it was probably illegal.
I know the rule of law is in sad shape right now, but companies still avoid doing illegal shit right out in the open, and that's all that's needed to cut back dramatically on advertising.
no it wasn’t illegal. Grafitti wasn’t always a crime.
People who think they have a right to deface other people's property say the weirdest shit.
Again graffiti was not always seen as a crime. Remember many paints weren’t super permanent when applied to things like brickface for most of our history.
Yeah, and it used to be legal to dump your industrial waste in the river, now it's not.
Laws change.
That’s a false equivalence though.
In both situation you make it illegal for corporations to do something, and punish them with fines and criminal sentences for executives if they're caught doing so, leading to a decrease in that behaviour.
So what about the situations do you see as different that makes it a false equivalency?
Painting graffiti and dumping hazardous waste in rivers are not equivalent crimes hence the false equivalence. Did you really need that clarified?
Yes, we're talking about making advertising illegal, which would change advertising to be illegal, similar to how pollution is illegal.
You seem to be arguing that it would be impossible to make advertising illegal because you wouldn't pass laws to make advertising illegal....
That's not a false equivalency, that's you just insisting that advertising's not that bad and shouldn't be illegal. Nothing about your feelings on whether or not it should be illegal changes whether or not we could make it illegal.
That does not make equating graffiti and dumping hazardous waste equivalent. The false equivalence was you comparing graffiti to illegal river dumping. There’s no amount of sophistry that will make your claim logically valid.
I'm not being sophisticated, I'm trying to keep you on track.
If you want to have a different argument about whether or not advertising is deserving of jail sentences, steep GDPR level fines, slaps on the wrist, or nothing, that's fine, we can have that one.
But this reply chain was about whether or not it's possible to make advertising illegal, which it is.
I accused you of sophistry not of being sophisticated. You should look that word up to avoid this situation next time.
This part of the chain is me calling out. your false equivalence as you compared graffiti to river dumping which you keep trying to claim isn’t invalid and now you are trying to “keep me on track” because you seemingly cannot admit you made a terrible analogy.
Because I never claimed they were equivalent, I said that river dumping laws are an example of how to make something illegal, after your dumb ass claimed it was impossible to make advertising illegal because it's been around for a long time.
And the fakse equivalence is we were talking about graffiti at that point. Hence the false equivalence between them. We have had ads like billboards for thousands of years in some places. Anywhere you find a whole bunch of people you find ads for the extra stuff people have. The only times when this isn't true is when no one has extra stuff they don't need.
So do you work for the marketing industry or is it a loved one of yours?
No, unlike many people on Lemmy I seem to have an actual education from schools that teach history and economics
Lmao, and all that history and economics taught you just these two lessons?
Let me guess, you went to American schools? Learned all that America History (TM)?