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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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I've always hated advertising, but I hated it even more once I worked in advertising.
That being said, it's unfair to advertisers. (ugh, I hate saying that, because it's a slimy business, but this is the reality) Nobody has the time to thoroughly research EVERY business that wants to buy advertising. Also, there's a fine line between scams and completely legal yet manipulative business.
Bill might be starting a legitimate small business and wants to advertise to get his first clients. There's very little information available online and no reviews because he's just starting out, but that could look like a fly by night scammer.
Joe owns a similar small business. He charges too much and he doesn't do very good work. That's not illegal, but people who use his services might feel like they got scammed.
Bob's a piece of shit. He wants to take your money and give you nothing in return. He knows what an advertiser would look for to verify his legitimacy, and he makes a fake website full of fake reviews.
In this instance, the advertiser might refuse to sell to Bill, get sued for selling to Joe and spend money and time proving that he's technically legit, and perhaps not even know that Bob's a scammer until months after he's taken the money and run.
Uhhh maybe they should find the time to do that then? How is "we don't have the time" a valid excuse? Either hire more staff to do so, or sell fewer ads.
Unfortunately that would disproportionately impact small local businesses far more than large corporations.
How?
Because you know who General Electric is and it’s easy to verify they’re actually advertising with you and that they’re a legitimate company, Jim-Bob’s Auto Repair, not so much.
Oh yeah i see auto repair scam adverts all the time...?
Wait no, im seeing goddamn miracle cures for aging on youtube. Old guy literally saying itll make you 20 years old again.
It's not just time and resources, they too are being lied to. If the scam is good enough that people will fall for it, some advertisers will as well.
Right now there are no regulations, so many don't care at all. That sucks, but the scammers are the problem here. They are the ones trying to rip you off. The ad companies might not care if you get screwed or not, but it's unrealistic for us to expect them to know EXACTLY what every client's intentions are. A business could run legitimately for years and then start running a scam. How long would we give the advertisers to realize that the client has started scamming people? Do they get in trouble because they ran ads for someone who would LATER start scamming people?
I'm all for discussing other ways to control advertising, but shooting the messenger isn't it.
I haven't and likely can't think of a good solution to handling the scenarios you're talking about. They are good questions that someone smarter than me should address. However, to use those scenarios to completely admonish advertising platforms for blatantly obvious scams is asinine. "Well, what if a legitimate business starts scamming people?" should have little relevancy to the question of "Should we accept this ad from a user advertising that they're going to double your money if you give them access to your financial accounts?"
I'm not saying it's simple or quick to solve, but there is very obvious low-hanging fruit that could be dealt with but is somehow not because these platforms aren't held accountable whatsoever. It has to start somewhere.
Businesses exist to make profit, not to take care of you. Corporations will only care about your welfare to the extent that that creates profit for them or the laws require them to.
While also complaining its not fair when we protect ourselves from the business they won't protect us from e.g. ad blockers.
Google going so far to invent "Web drm" to ensure we have no choice but allow them to serve us malicious ads that the won't filer themselves
And then they complain when we tell them that we want to overthrow capitalism.
It’s giving „you have to accept being harmed because otherwise my business can’t turn a profit“
Fuk yo business then, don give a shit about it.
Absolutely. There is an exchange of money involved in the advertising services, so it would be natural to expect a small fee for sanity-checking the advertisement. Facebook are mostly able to check for nudity, porn or gore in the advertisement, so with some additional inspection, it should be possible to weed out a lot of scams.
Did you take the seconds to read the comment you're replying to?
What the fuck are you talking about?
This is a dumb excuse for a profitable business. If you’re making money on it you should be able to subsidize controls. If you can’t operate a business safely and still make a profit, you shouldn’t be in business. It’s that simple.
Wrong. Nobody wants to spend the money to do that, because they know they will not be held responsible for aiding and abetting fraud.
Change the responsibility factor, and the money will be there.
Or, instead of finding that money, they find another way to avoid spending it.
It wouldn't be long before you only see advertising from large corporations. Love them or hate them, we all know that Walmart is a legit business. A potential, morally superior competitor, that we've never heard of may not even get the chance to advertise. The newspaper or TV station doesn't want to risk getting sued for a scam, so they just refuse service. Walmart keeps playing ads, and nobody ever hears about the store that we never knew we wanted.
In the one hand though, if only the big corporations can afford ads, blocking them becomes even easier.
Makes sense when you're dealing with actual services or products, but I've yet to see a single "earn 200 per hour" ad that isn't a scam or "legal" pyramid, those should be easy enough to block and ban, no?
Who decides which legal businesses are allowed to run ads?
I completely agree that MLMs are a "scam" but they are legitimate businesses in the eyes of the law. You suggested we ban them, so what defines who is allowed to advertise and who isn't? I'm not comfortable with leaving it as "anything somebody in charge doesn't like".
Some extra regulation on advertising might at least help somewhat, "Any adverts promising financial gains must clearly demonstrate how said gain is to be achieved"
Maybe be a good JOB CREATOR and create some motherfucking jobs to handle it. Oh no our bottom line... 😭
It'd be a terrible shame if advertising became more expensive (because they needed to employ content checkers), and companies could no longer afford to advertise as much
As much as I don't love advertising, it's mainly just the big corporations that wouldn't care about a bit of a price lift. Small businesses will be hit disproportionately.