Comment by harimau777
2 months ago
Maybe a good initial step would be to tighten up false advertising laws:
Make it illegal to make statements that are not objectively true. E.g. you can't say that your product is "the best", you can only say specifically how it is better.
Put restrictions on advertising an idealized version of a product and then selling a lesser version. E.g. the difference between what fast food ads show versus what you get. I'm sure it would be difficult to completely fix that since it's so subjective, but we could probably get incremental improvements.
I consider it false advertising to not tell me the drawbacks of your product compared to your competitors. I shouldn't have to look up every competitor to find your car is the only one without a steering wheel, even if it has heated seats.
Ads don't even bother with that anymore. Theye pure id- make something memorable so you associate something with thinking about their product. "All happy families go to Disney" style.
These are often lies too but its the subtext not the text
They already do that. Is always in TINY print or they use weasel words that are meaningless in common use, but defendable in court.
Improved health is a good one. It doesn't really mean anything.
That's exactly the sort of thing that I think should be banned. Particularly the meaningless terms like "improved health".
But that's almost impossible. If the law says that all statements made MUST be true (which it kind of already does, by the way), companies will exclusively use weasel phrases to avoid any lawsuit. Otherwise, when you're trying to sell phlaborivin and bill it as a cure for cancer, when you find the one patient that doesn't respond to treatment, you're screwed.
Anyway, what I'm saying is that saying true things is what we already require. Human nature will pervert that system and follow the letter of the law; that's the literal system we have now.