Advertising targeted towards minors needs to be banned.
Advertising
targeted towards minorsneeds to be banned.Advertising itself isn’t a bad thing.
No, it’s… it’s pretty bad.
I know one example of advertising that I liked: the creators of Penny Arcade had only advertisements for computer games that they liked. And they made those ads in the same art style as their own comic.
Advertisements are good when they’re an honest endorsement. Any others are inherently deceptive and often invasive.
Some level of advertising is a necessary evil when you’re in a capitalist system because otherwise people have no way to get their products out ti the market. There’s a balance to be struck.
Hell even in other systems advertising is still important for finding out about cool new things even if money no longer exists
If money doesn’t exist how do you pay for the ads?
extremely incorrect buzzer sound
They can put up signs inside their business windows. That’s plenty. Everything else is a blight.
It’s not 1950 anymore.
They are making billboards illegal in most places. And it’s a pretty awesome improvement I must say.
Oh they had roadside billboards in 1950. And they were a blight back then. Advertising is a cancer.
Extremism is cancer.
Haha what? I’m not burning billboards and slaughtering CEOs. I’m just sick to death of all these ads. Advertising is a distributed global brainwashing campaign, by the wealthy, against the working class. They don’t hire psychologists to exploit our lizard brains for no reason, and that’s why it needs to be outlawed.
For anyone that is downvoting this. Go ahead and try to run a business without advertising, let me know how that works out for you.
This is one of those bizarre Lemmy echo chamber things. I’ve never seen this sentiment that advertising is evil and should be stopped at all costs anywhere else but on Lemmy it’s super common. Idk where it comes from. I get that advertising kind of sucks but it just seems like a weird thing to get so passionate about especially considering how many other things are wrong with the world. Sorry you’re getting downvoted to hell, you’re not crazy, Lemmy is.
@markovs_gun @RedditIsDeddit what’s lemmy?
That famous Bansky quote is older than Lemmy and is posted all over the Internet. There are cities around that ban all advertisements. There are movements for a ban on ads in public spaces in many cities all around the world. That really has nothing to do with Lemmy
It’s the state of advertising tbh. If ads were still of the “Look, here’s a cool product” variety, or even the “Look, here’s people happily using a cool product” kind then the world would probably be a better place. Even targeting isn’t so bad, when it’s broad like “We want businesses to know about our B2B product.”
The evil in modern advertising is the overly specific targeting, the lying, the psychological tricks, and the way they seem to invade every possible space.
Psych tricks were there since Bernays “torches of freedom” to sucker women into nicotine addiction like the men.
As with basically everything bad in the US, it’s another reminder that Reagan was a human shitstain.
Your classic 80s cartoons were toy commercials. Candy, toys, cereals started being marketed directly to children.
All ads suck, but ads based on user rather than content go too far.
This kind of shit should not be tolerated.
At some point we need to start criminalizing shit like this and actually holding people accountable.
💯 Big tech companies think they’re above the law.
Thus far, they’d basically be right. Any fines are simply chocked up to “cost of doing business” expenses and since no one wants to either make solid laws against this stuff OR hold them accountable for current ones, they’ll just keep at it.
If a law has a fine, it was created to deter poor people.
That depends on if it is a dayfine or not.
A fine of €500 for speeding will only really affect poor people, 30 dayfines which value is dictated by the wealth of the individual is a better system.
It’s so much bigger than this. It starts young. iPad kids. Strict gender roles. Sexualization of children. Learning from parents who have been conditioned by capitalism, sexism and more. We got little girls that want skincare products and teens talking about plastic surgery. It’s bad.
Agreed though. Punish people for ruining society. I think I read a while ago that France had required social media posts to flag when images have been altered. We need more laws like this too.
As little kids we got like no genderbased education from our parents. When we moved our grandmother got a lot more control and dumped blue boyish stuff on my brother and forbid the girly things. Has never worn a dress since and now is still not willing to wear one
(it could be that us older sisters influenced that he wants to wear dresses too)
Bummer. Happens to almost all men in the US. Maybe less now, but this new red pill generation is wild.
And mass sharing of images/videos which has made it so much easier to connect people, specifically in one case I saw today of someone on Telegram sharing child porn. How do you even put the cat back in the box?
People don’t want to hear it, but AI. Used intelligently and responsibly.
That does make sense, although I’m not sure we can trust it to work like that.
Unfortunately, the “used intelligently and responsibly” part is why people dislike AI - they don’t trust companies or people to use it that way (and for good reason based on the results so far).
Plus, it’s not gonna put everything back into Pandora’s Box. What we’re in is a societal and cultural arms race where AI is just another escalation that’s being used by both sides.
It’s funny you reference Pandora’s Box. I often use it to refer to the growth of AI and people’s resistance towards it. It’s not going anywhere. It’s not slowing down. We gotta make it work for us.
can’t believe a social network started by incels in college to rate girls sexually would do something like this.
Just evil but you’ll never see anyone punished for it.
Saint Luigi deliver us from villains like Facebook
As if there would be no social networking without Zuckerberg.
Like any sin, the change starts with us. If we want a healthy social network, we can build a healthy social network.
Tom from Myspace never treated us like this.
Even though Luigi Mangione didn’t actually commit any crime and his trial is a flimsy sham, I agree. He is the public face of whoever really did it, and they are an icon of justice.
That’s 0% surprising. FB had always been about making girls feel bad. It’s in its sorce code
Facebook started as a Hot or Not website. Fucking creepy.
YouTube also started because the founders wanted to see the Janet Jackson nipple slip. (Which fuck them for that.)
Ya FB is,was and will forever be bad for society and woman especially
I mean,do you really think janet jackson didn’t want people to see?
Ya FB is,was and will forever be bad for society and woman especially
I mean,do you really think jackson didn’t want people to see
lol, Jesus. It is like what a screen writer would come up with for a movie that contained a terrible company run by terrible people doing stuff so outlandishly terrible everyone watching would think “the absurdity of the terrible is how you know it is made up”.
Teenagers should not be on social media. I rest my case.
Not just teenagers. Facebook and quite a few others should outright be banned. Not only they are scientifically proven to be a mental health catastrophe and a political threat to democracy, it’s also pretty clear now that both these things are part of their design, not bugs or unintended emerging properties.
Facebook actively contributed to the genocide in Myanmar, and did basically nothing about it because they didnt want to hire more moderators that spoke the language, so that they could adequately remove pro-genocidal content
They shouldn’t, but also PSA to any parents but modern parenting advice typically is to let your kids use social media if they choose, and guide them through the social and emotional difficulties with good communication. Don’t blanket ban it because they’ll just use it anyways without guidance, and be unprepared the moment they turn 18.
It’s a case of: 99.9% of kids are smoking cigarettes so yours will too. Better to show them how to use a weekly cigar without inhaling, than just ban it which won’t work.
Ok, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Arguing like this is kinda pointless.
I don’t think it will be possible to get them off social media (or the internet in general), so you need to find ways to make it work.
E.g. minors can not be advertised to, no algorithmic content, no doom-scrolling, and heightened data protection. I think teenager should get access to as much as possible to reduce the “risk” of them trying to go around it. “Their” version of social media might even be the superior one in the end.
If the world wasn’t on fire at the moment, people could calmly discuss possible solutions and propose laws in every country to actually protect their children from e.g. the stuff mentioned in the linked article. Sadly, this isn’t going to happen …
The thing is that social media have an oversized influence that makes a calm discussion of possible solutions very hard to have. When the US recognized the implications of letting a foreign power exert so much control over their people, they tried banning TikTok, or breaking it up so their US operation would be under US control.
Facebook should also be split and its EU operation purchased by a European company, that could then spend more time implementing the other changes you mention (doom-scrolling, data protection) and less time lobbying to get all these pesky EU regulations removed.
And yes, it does feel heartbreaking to count the US as a threat to national security, but China has never threatened to annex Greenland with military force, so what would have been paranoia and extreme anti-americanism last year is now the sensible, level-headed thing to do.
Ya!
Important to keep a semi-reasonable option in the major app stores, unless we want Social-Media-Tor dot Mirror or something to become the new hotness
How isn’t it possible? Just don’t give them phones, it’s not that complicated
You can walk into any Walmart in America and buy a cheap smartphone for $30.
This approach is even less effective than “just don’t give them drugs”.
Ok, but you also need a data plan to go along w/ it (or regular visits to top up; is that still a thing?), plus hide it from parents, or you’re going to have a bad time.
Drugs are a different story. You can often get drugs from friends (free to start), can buy them a little at a time, and you don’t need to stash any at home. For a phone to be useful, it needs to be readily accessible, which means you’ll have it with you everywhere.
It’s possible, but it’s going to take a fair amount of work to hide a phone from a parent who’s paying even a little bit of attention.
The real problem here is parents. Parents need to step up and do a better job. Source: am a parent.
You don’t need a data plan if you can access wifi. There is public wifi and I don’t think most parents even know how to check the devices using their home wifi.
It’s not hard, and parents can easily change the WiFi password if they don’t know how to check the leases if they suspect something is up.
I’m very much in the camp of no filters and building a relationship on trust, but occasionally verifying if that trust is misplaced.
I’m a GenX that works with IT. I can tell you that none of my coworkers that are the same generation would know how to do any of that.
I agree that parents should be more involved with their children, but when do we hold a company responsible for the harm it causes?
Look, maybe it’s true that parents should be doing a better job here. The thing is, that’s an individual solution. This is a systemic problem. How kids (and adults) interact socially and consume media is fundamentally changed over the last thirty years and we’re going to have to find ways to adapt to that as a society.
Yeah, in any particular individual case you can probably come up with a list of things the parent could have done differently. The reality is that this is a problem for tens (hundreds?) of millions of parents.
You can hand wave away any problem that affects children with “parents should do a better job”. It didn’t work for obesity, it didn’t work for child traffic deaths, it didn’t work for fentanyl overdoses, it didn’t work for school shootings, it didn’t work for measles, and it’s not going to work for this either.
I’m just going to copy/paste what I wrote in a previous comment in a similar thread:
Everybody is so quick to blame the parents in these situations. Maybe there is some truth to that, but people also need to reckon with the fact that kids (and adults) are being constantly inundated by Skinner box apps, and “platforms” full of engagement bait designed to be as addictive and attractive as possible. All run by corporations with functionally no regard for the safety of their users.
Yeah, sure, if you’re giving advice to an individual parent, they should probably be keeping a closer eye on what their kids are doing.
But there are systemic problems here that can’t be fixed with individual action. By laying the blame solely at the feet of the parents here, you are in effect putting individual parents up against dozens of huge corporations, each with armies of expert advertisers, designers, and psychologists working to build these products. It’s hardly a fair fight.
Prohibition never works; people will always find other bad — maybe even worse — things to do. The human pressure to have social interactions may lead to creating terrible IRL friendships, ones that can be much more dangerous.
Instead, I would strongly advise for honest, mature conversations about the risks that social media comes along with. This can lead to a highly positive impact, especially if you teach how to observe interactions between people through social media, even if not interacting, yourself.
Prohibition works… temporarily. If you believe your child is not ready for SM, then prohibiting them from it until they are can work.
So yes, have a mature conversation with your kids, set boundaries, etc. That’s something that should happen between a parent and a child, not between a government and a child.
I actually agree with you, especially in the last sentence. Knowing the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, governments are definitely willing to manipulate children through control of information.
Ok, when was the last time you saw a working payphone? 2010? It isn’t safe for teens to not have a phone because payphones don’t exist any more.
Humans should not be on social media.
Fixed.
I wish I could ban old people from it as well because when their mental processing ability declines, so does their ability to detect bullshit news from bots
That’s sounds like blaming teens for the actions of the adults behind Facebook.
That’s a fallacy. Teenagers are the victims here. So I’m obviously blaming greedy corporations, lack of good parenting and proper regulation from authorities.
So teens should be allowed to go anywhere adults make it dangerous because it’s the adults’ faults? I hope you don’t have kids.
Zuckerberg’s $330 million mega yacht may be tracked here: https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9857511
Ah right, still in the north sea outside of Norway. Recently there was news of Sami villages being bribed to not put up a fuss when a “prominent person” wanted to go heliskiing, then his yacht arrived on site:
Dystopian as fuck
TIL teen girls still used Facebook.
Instagram too according to the article.
I get Instagram (lots of creative types there), Facebook is a bit surprising though.
Instagram is considered for old folks now???
Where were you for the last decade? I’d think tiktok is starting to wind down by now, but me and my shaking stick wouldn’t know that.
Not on Instagram and not keeping up with what preteens do, that’s for sure.
Centralized social media is an advertisement platform that targets advertisements according to information & conduct users feed the platform, and some of those users are teenagers?
They’re advertising cosmetics to teenagers unlike ever before in the history of teen-centric media?
Goddam I had to read that headline 3 times before I understood the implication!
That is outright disgusting, and such practices ought to be outlawed.
Or as Trump would say, very cool and very legal way to make money.Remember: someone went out of their way and put effort into programming this.
An entire team.
A study published in a medical journal showed that Facebook (primarily) along with other social media was responsible for the rise in teenage suicide in girls. Let that sink in.
