from Hacker News

Is Advertising Immoral?

by bentocorp on 3/18/25, 10:07 PM with 6 comments

• by k310 on 3/18/25, 10:52 PM

  IMO, the purpose of advertising is to skew an impartial assessment of purchasing options, such as my own or some other's survey and comparison of options, or to just induce demand (think of those carpet bombing ads on sports radio, for tax remedies, divorce help, cures for droopy dongles, and so forth), and so on, often using scare tactics. Homeland Insecurity showed up recently, threatening immigrants. So it goes.

  I do seek out reviews that are as impartial as possible. Some provide them, and make their living from affiliate sales (note that really bad reviews are rare in these cases)

  But I can't cover the downside as well as George Monbiot in a landmark article [0]. "Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it." (2011)

  And political advertising? It's outrageous since "Citizens United" allowed unlimited spending by interest groups. It's all calculated propaganda war, based largely on cognitive biases [1] and prejudices.

  So as not to be all negative, there is some real benefit to advertising of events and useful sales (not just loss-leaders)

  FWIW, I do listen to sports talk radio, but on a YT stream that miraculously silences the radio station's ads almost entirely, do not watch TV, and use ad-blockers on the internet, so I practice what I preach.

  [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

• by bediger4000 on 3/18/25, 10:45 PM

  This reads like weak tea. Maybe AI generated but edited by a human. There's no byline that I can find. It's also offered by an ad blocker vendor - it's in that grey area of maybe being a "supporting" blog post for a product. It just might be one of the ads doing unethical stuff that it talks about.

  Not sure how to treat this piece.

• by almosthere on 3/18/25, 10:15 PM

  I don't think advertising is immoral, but the techniques they're employing are.

  Advertising with something like a banner ad, that is related to the content of the context, is moral.

  Advertising a full screen, non-closable ad, that has content related to gathered facts about users, is very immoral, death penalty immoral in my opinion.

• by theage on 3/19/25, 7:45 AM

  Insidious perhaps. There is no middle ground of neutral advertising to be had. It's all just pressing upon the pain points of one social sect or another, undermining mental acuity to make 'em feel inadequate or falsely adequate.

  I run an adblock app as well so it's hard to begrudge anyone trying to gain undeserved significance for their thing - when some invention is new who is to say what is deserved unless the right people know about it?

  Whilst you might be able to block the ads for now you can't block the downslide of polite society that largely accepts the techniques into their lives and keeps them in their back pocket.

• by JohnFen on 3/19/25, 2:09 PM

  Advertising is not immoral. It's a kind of communication. However, advertising can absolutely be done in an immoral way and a huge amount of it (particularly online) is.

• by eipi10_hn on 3/18/25, 11:15 PM

  No, but when Advertising becomes

  - Spywares to fingerprint and track people,

  - Non-moderated minefields of scams, phishing and malwares,

  then yes.