Blocking a few of the biggest paths absolutely can work, look at 20th century TV with a few big networks. You couldn't easily get wide distribution of anything too bonkers.

We already have a form of this for the internet that you can see if you visit sketchy pirate websites, you don't see those ads for porn games on facebook or any reputable website. They get flagged by adsafe and/or the ~15 or so big exchanges. So it's possible, it's just a question of will.

Actually, you do see ads for those things there, and on instagram, and on threads, and many much stranger and more fucked up things. That's part of the entire problem.

These kinds of ads aside, I've also seen offers of free shit from amazon sellers in exchange for positive reviews, "legal"/unscheduled drug analogues, flavored nitrous (free shipping!), unrestricted gambling/prediction markets, and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers (I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account)

> and oddly enough cellular/wifi jammers where the ad was specifically targeting semi truck drivers

That one is about fighting back against employer surveillance, and it's not just limited to semi truck drivers any more, people are also really interested in fighting back against their car snitching on them to their insurance.

>Actually, you do see ads for those things there

At 1/1000 the rate.

The rate should be zero, or very very close to it.

With the amount of money they've spent minimizing liability and covering up what a dogshit job they do, they probably could have hired enough humans to handle manually combing through each submission, and an engineering team to train a classifer. It's disgusting imho

Wrong, I see them as much or more than I see completely insane, unrelated ads for things like "managing my herd of cows". I do not live on or anywhere near cow farms, or know anyone who has cows, or lives near cow farms.

> I do not drive a semi truck, gamble, or search for unscheduled drug analogues, nor do I have an active amazon account

Yeah yeah yeah but what about those stranger and more fucked up things? They come from someplace like fingerprinting your browser, no? A genuine question, as a user of firefox + ublock I simply don't see them, not on desktop not on phone. The only ads I rarely see are some given server decides to host themselves.

[delayed]

20th century TV created a bottleneck via a hard-limited set of channels. We seem to be going the opposite direction now, which each platform spawning an unlimited number of "channels".

customary reminder that things can be better…

“things are bad” is a good reason to align your work towards things that make life better

As hard as that may be, it’s where progress rather than backsliding comes from

We should champion every effort for improving the conditions rather than restate things are bad

Case in point: we used to say all the same things GP said about advertising about businesses that used child labor. Now there are far, far fewer of them.

Exactly. Just saying "we're gonna always have 7 day work weeks with children dieing in factories and unsafe conditions!!" Is exactly the kind of catastrophising and attitude that gives those in power continued power.

Fight back. Organise. Get shit done in real life

Human Attentiom needs to be treated as a scarce finite resource. Otherwise they have many different ways to overfish.

How to make that happen is the trillion $$$ question.

Moloch problems are rarely solved by individual actions against the issue. That is, because they are legal and profitable, it's going to be very difficult to make a living in the radius of an industry that does ads that does not use these tactics. At the end of the day we need to eat. Corporations that use these crappy methods are apt to grow larger and richer than moral ones, making it doubly difficult to make that living.

Hence the best call of action is to push for industry regulation forcing a level market.

This isn't about advertising tactics, it's about lack of regulation.