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What If We Made Advertising Illegal? (simone.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by sundrei@lemmy.sdf.org to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world

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The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn't been valid for decades.

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[–] bss03@infosec.pub 21 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The future is not required to contain the business models of the past. More specially, I don't believe "there are businesses that would fail" is a good argument. We need UBI or a better social safety net for the people in those businesses, but the businesses can simply fail and nothing will be lost.

That said, I think advertising can probably be reformed through a combination of removing the puffery exception, enhanced enforcement of existing truth in advertising laws, and increased civil liability for falsehoods at all layers: product (Kraft, Nestle, Tesla), production ("Mad men"),, and propagation (networks, Hulu, YT)