Comment by squigz
11 days ago
Even if advertising were to disappear over night, why do you think that would stop the spread of propaganda, corruption of democratic processes, and social unrest? I don't really see a connection between the two?
11 days ago
Even if advertising were to disappear over night, why do you think that would stop the spread of propaganda, corruption of democratic processes, and social unrest? I don't really see a connection between the two?
It's more like the tech that allows middlemen to insert into everything and be very hyper personalized/targeted
The finiancial connexion is explained here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Really? They're quite connected.
If the architecture of the web changes to one where people only see content that they've asked to see, and that kills advertising, it would also put a significant damper on anyone else whose business involves injecting unwanted content into a viewer's consciousness. Propagandists are the first to come to mind.
If it can become prohibitively expensive to sway an election by tampering with people's information, then the alternative (policies that actually benefit the people) will become more popular, leading to reduced unrest.
Democracy is having a bad time lately because its enemies have new weapons for use against it. If we break those weapons, it starts working again.
Where did I say that all of those things would stop?
What I said is that adtech systems are also used for it. So if they were to disappear overnight, a _proportion_ of those activities, and a pretty large one I reckon, would also disappear.
Okay, but my question remains - why? What is the connection between those things and advertising?
It seems way more likely to me that they would simply adapt, as they always have.
The connection is that those wishing to influence public opinion can do so by running ad campaigns that target precisely the demographic they wish to manipulate. Adtech doesn't care whether you're promoting products or ideas. This connection should be obvious after the Cambridge Analytica leak.
Social media and any media platform also enables the spreading of propaganda, but it's not as systematic as the tools built for advertising.
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Sure, I can explain.
Basically, adtech is the backbone of the attention economy where more clicks = more revenue. So the incentives are to always say the most inflammatory clickbait you can, to incentivize profits. Sensible and boring stable takes and agreement will always be stifled to promote outrage, beefs, and clickbait to maximize revenue. To generalize; stability in any general field like politics or journalism gets turned into obnoxious grandstanding to be more like reality tv to get more attention. In software, people who monetize off advertising are incentivized to build dark patterns maximized on attention grabbing. Whereas without advertising as the main source of revenue, people stop building dark these patterns to steal your attention, as you are paying them directly for a service, so you are the customer instead of the product.
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