This is just not ok. I understand that screening everyone in the world's personal posts/shares for 'fake news' is a daunting task, but KYC-ing advertisers and screening/auditing ads for blatant and obvious scams or false marketing is many orders of magnitude less resource intensive... and should be required by laws with teeth.

If the costs of doing so mean that it's impossible to make a profit as an ad platform, then that business model should die.

And very easy to automate. We know they can do it. But until there is sufficient threat of action if they don't then they are happy to let their users get fleeced in exchange for the advertising $.

There is an argument that "if they crack down on the easy to detect stuff, the scams will just get more clever" but that is not at all why they aren't making more effort.

One funny thing I've noticed with facebook, is that if you start responding to such adverts with comments along the lines of "this is obviously a scam because..." responses, they start showing you more and more of that sort of scam presumably because you have shown engagement with the previous ones.

"Not OK" is forgetting to clean up your table after the meal. What these scammers are doing is simply fraud and Facebook should be liable as they enable it.

I remember when I set up my first FB ad (maybe 10 years ago?) it took a few days because some of them were manually reviewed. Fast forward 10 years and they accept any fraudster who pays them a few bucks. Just low scum, that's all.

Glad I deleted mine in 2010.

I've said it before: Advertising is a psychological attack on human weakness.

> I find it hard to separate the fraudsters from the engineers that enable them

Paraphrasing because I can't find the original:

"What does it say of humanity to have so many of the smartest minds in the world working on making advertising more effective"

> this screed was therapeutic

+1

My stance on web advertising has always been "go back to static, not in-my-face, non-animated, no audio, no javascript ads and I'll consider turning off my ad blocker."

I'm absolutely not letting my computer get infected through the ad networks, which is a separate issue really.

In my dream world, all forms of push advertising would be illegal, full stop. Meanwhile, I'll put whatever effort it takes to block everything.

Contrast this with email and phone, the only successful federated systems. Spam is illegal in some countries, and there's a concerted effort by everyone to fight it.

When no one controls the whole experience end-to-end, there is simply no technical possibility to expose you to something against your will. This is why decentralized social media is the future. I just can't see how Facebook could survive much longer unless there's a drastic change of some sort.

Sadly, I think things need to get much worse before they get better. People still don't understand the dangers of it, though I believe this has already become a sociopolitical problem instead of just an annoyance.

If I want to buy something, and if I don't know exactly what, I'd like an unbiased list of things in that category to choose from. And when I don't want to buy anything — which is, again, when I'm reading an article for example — I don't want to be reminded that economy exists AT ALL. There is no place or circumstance in my life where advertising, as it is known today, would be anything but annoyance to me. Which is why all my devices have ad blockers installed and third-party cookies disabled.

I use ad blockers.

Pay for YouTube premium. Use a sponsorship skip extension.

Only watch ad-free TV / streaming.

Pay for Spotify.

Use tweetdeck for Twitter.

Don't use Instagram or Facebook.

I certainly don't listen to the radio.

Where else can I possibly see an ad? A billboard? That's easy to ignore.

Imo it's all worth it.

We should be charging vendors for traffic that is only designed to forward their business, when it happens on our own local loop.

Episodes of Jeopardy, now temporarily hosted by Dr. Oz.

I would love to see how an alternative reality without advertisements would look. I'm not sure if we could ever fully accomplish this given that there always will be people willing to pay for eyeballs and people happy to take money or goods to change their messaging.

Because that is small potatoes compared to the tracking, matching and profiling of individuals. I believe that is the big threat to society (and possibly democracy)

  - Do the ads still track users?
  - Yes, but they are not unobtrusive
  - Yeah, that is not acceptable.

- Tune the advertising to best manipulate a particular person (think of it as a PID controller tuning inputs to a system);

- Ad attribution - i.e. determining which companies in the advertising chain should get paid when a customer buys something from someone.

Restricting the shape and form advertising is allowed to take addresses the driving factors behind privacy violations.

> Perhaps I'm growing increasingly blind to any positive impacts of the discipline, but ethically I find it hard to separate the fraudsters from the engineers that enable them.

There are definitely useful spinoffs - like they always are, when you throw a lot of money and a bright mind into solving tough problems. But it's hard to argue the positives here where the primary driver is a huge net social negative, and spinoffs could've been done pursuing better goals.

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[0] - And I mean that - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.

But something went wrong at some point.

Similarly with options - options were a great way farmers could offload risk to the products buyers, who, in exchange could get better prices.

But when options started to be used for something which is not much different from lottery bets, again, something went wrong.

This is important lesson. Capitalism is a great system, but it cannot be narrowed to greed. Capitalism requires working ethics since we are not able to regulate every aspect of life - it is practically impossible.

But ethics no longer works. Big IT companies owners were fixing employees wages, who cared. Amazon owner does not care about warehouses workers miserable work conditions. Facebook owner is ok to steer people into fights, as this increases "engagement", ads clicks and revenue.

Has it happened that Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg was asked to leave his country club or whatever place they are hanging out because of the unethical behavior? Obviously not.

I hear about new ones by word of mouth from collegues (from people who go out of their way to watch product releases on the apple away day or whatever it is). I hear about new gadgets by paying for someone to go to CES and look at what's new.

Tesla, and starlink, again is word of mouth, or deliberatly seeking out information on it (by visiting tesla.com for example).

The market is literally a big, greedy - in algorithmic sense - optimization engine. It optimizes away everything that stands in the way of making more money. It optimizes away quality, and it absolutely optimizes away any and all ethics. Marketing and advertising are a clear example of this in two separate ways: on the object level, they're already doing everything they can that isn't strictly illegal[0]; on the meta level, you see that competing on marketing and advertising has a better ROI than actually trying to make better products.

You cannot expect a sense of ethics from a system which requires ethics as a containment vessel, and continuously tries to erode it. Much like you can't expect water to just keep flowing in a straight line, in absence of a bank or pipe that would constrain its expansion.

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[0] - And enforced. GDPR demonstrates that with insufficient enforcement, otherwise reputable companies will absolutely break the law.

Whether it's still Capitalism at that point is an interesting question. Some people seem to call any market-based system capitalism. For others the lack of ethics is definitional.

My own view is that we probably ought to stop using the term "capitalism" entirely for the most part, and be more specific about what we mean.

It seems like you're mixing advertising = fraud, when in reality it's just people who commit fraud that use advertising because regulators can't seem to act.