deciding what is and isn't "propaganda" feels like a much harder task than forcing companies to have your consent for how they use and who they share your data with...

If they were just straight facts ads would be just bullet lists of features, the price, together with delivery costs and methods.

No colour, no pictures that are not strictly informative, no reviews, stars, celebrity endorsements, etc.

Perhaps someone in the AI/ML field should create a tool that distils ads down to such a bare-bones representation. I won't say down to their essence because the essence of most ads is the high octane sell not the informative part. Then instead of blocking ads uBlock and friends could fetch the distilled version.

> if an ad is straight facts

How would you determine this? Distinguishing fact from opinion is impossibly difficult, just ask social media companies.

Besides, ads are supposed to be manipulative, otherwise they wouldn't be nearly as effective. Taken to its extreme, and with the capabilities of adtech, it's no wonder they're used for propaganda, to influence elections, etc. None of this spreads "new information" meant to educate people, but mostly falsehoods with a specific agenda from anyone willing to pay for it.

In addition to being impossible to determine what constitutes as propaganda or not, fact-checking ads would go against their whole purpose, against all the "progress" the advertising industry has made in the past century, and would crumble the current adtech giants. Hell freezing over has better chances of happening.

> More philosophically, should we, as free-willed people, be prevented from seeing "untruths"?

If those "untruths" are used to psychologically manipulate people to get them to buy, vote or think a certain way, then I'd argue that they're doing a net harm to society, and should be heavily regulated.

We can't control and fact-check speech, but we can limit its spread. What the internet has allowed is an unprecedented way of spreading information, and we can certainly control that. The difficult thing is again, determining what is "harmful" or not.

Does the news media not "psychologically manipulate people to get them to vote or think a certain way?" By your logic, we shouldn't just ban ads, we should ban most journalism and news websites, as they are all also propaganda arms to promote different ideologies.

Rather than banning everything that's not "straight facts," from ads to the news media, maybe teaching our population critical thinking is the solution instead. If our population is dumb, it'll always be extra-vulnerable to manipulation, no matter what regulations and guardrails we put in place.

There's an argument to be made that news media in the 20th century was focused on delivering facts, and that objective journalism as we knew it then is dead today. This shift was accelerated by the 24-hour news cycle and eventually the internet, where the media was incentivized by attention-grabbing headlines, advertising profits and private investors. When journalism was alive, opinions were sectioned off and known as editorials, and the public could assume that everything else was factual information. There's no such distinction today.

Teaching critical thinking is important, but let's not ignore the deeply rooted problems of both advertising and the modern news media.

The Spanish-American War was literally caused by journalists. It's always been an arm of propaganda. You're seeing this through rose-tinted glasses.

I'm not familiar with that part of history, but I think you're mistaking and vastly overblowing the role of "yellow" journalism in that case.

Scandal and satire have been a part of MSM for a long time, but it was very clear where the line is drawn that separates it from objective journalism. While corporate and political influence existed to an extent, objectivity was seen as sacred.

If you don't see a difference between news reporting from 40 or 50 years ago and today, I don't know what to tell you.

It was still less effective globally because you couldn't reach a few billion people 24/7 at the click of a button.

And it was more effective locally because a limited selection if newspapers and TV channels was all you had access to until the Internet came along.

> If our population is dumb

You cannot out-smart emotional manipulation. Most people who get caught up in cults believe they are too smart to fall for a cult.

> Does the news media not "psychologically manipulate people to get them to vote or think a certain way?" By your logic, we shouldn't just ban ads, we should ban most journalism and news websites, as they are all also propaganda arms to promote different ideologies.

You introduced a straw man argument to argue against. Journalists are subject to norms, pressures, and factcheckers that ads aren’t. Politicians spend big on ads that are deliberately misleading. The oversite that exists either isn’t enforced or is incredibly weak.

One way to consider ad personalization is: should someone grow richer if they know there is trauma in your life? If your friend dies, if you and your partner miscarry, if you were fired from work. Who should be allowed to profit from these events and why?

Do you honestly believe that advertising is a legitimate and useful source of truthful factual information that people should be using to make decisions and shape their thinking about the world?

Do you honestly think that there is a single "useful source of truthful factual information" on this planet? There is not a single organization out there that will not present you facts without some sort of bias or slant.

I would love to watch you tell me in person that you believe that targeted advertisements are as good a source of knowledge and information as any other on the planet, and try to keep a straight face while doing so.

Who cares that they're not a source of knowledge or information?

Who cares about having a conversation with someone who rejects the idea of any outside sources of information being accurate since you can never reach any sort of consensus on objective reality with them?

In my opinion, even "propaganda" in ads doesn't deserve to be banned. Why do we allow propaganda and bias in news media, but arbitrarily draw the line at advertisements?