Advertising targeted towards minors needs to be banned.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
1170 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
69726 readers
3147 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Advertising ~~targeted towards minors~~ needs to be banned.
The book os very good. Reading it now. The writer starts off with a great stoty about a shark attack.
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?
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".
can't believe a social network started by incels in college to rate girls sexually would do something like this.
Facebook... now even more toxic than previously known!
That's 0% surprising. FB had always been about making girls feel bad. It's in its sorce code
even a scathing rant about surveillance capitalism becomes fodder for the machine, as you can clearly see with the ads on this page.
Ads? I can see no ads...
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.
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.
Happy I got AdNauseam after uBlock Origin. Deleted my facebook a year ago, shit is an AI slopfest built upon the greed and manipulation of every part of the chain. Defcon 31 has a good talk that brings this up. "Disenshittify or die" by Cory Doctrow, cann recommend to watch.
What's AdNauseam?
I support the use of AdNauseam. Not sure if there are any more extreme alternatives, I now choose to be actively hostile towards advertising/tracking rather than just passively blocking it.
My dad has been talking about wanting something like AdNauseam for years, i was very happy when i found it. The extra mile would probably be to expand it with a VPN and constantly spam clicks, clear cache, switch IP and obfuscate data. Now we just wait for someone with enough time to build it...
Teenagers should not be on social media. I rest my case.
I hearby petition an amendment for an expansion of the child protective laws to widen the definition of abuse, neglect, and reckless abandonment of children to include:
"letting children browse without ad blockers"
Humans should not be on social media.
Fixed.
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.
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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
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 ...
How isn't it possible? Just don't give them phones, it's not that complicated
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.
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".
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
That's some cartoon villain level shit jfc
This type of advertising isn’t new. There is that famous (although the claims from the father have been questioned) New York Times article written by Charles Duhigg in 2012. A father of a teenage girl in Minnesota got upset for receiving coupons from Target for infant care related products. As the story goes, he later learned his daughter was in fact pregnant. It turns out Target was using some predictive algorithm to identify would-be mothers and straight up sending them coupons for infant care products. It seems ever since this article was published that they stopped doing this in such a direct manner. Again, there have people who questioned the validity of the claims for this specific story, but Target did confirm they were doing this.
My doctor's office (allegedly) handed my info to a plastic surgery clinic so they could send me a "happy 40th birthday, now fix your sagging bullshit!"-email the literal day I turned 40.
Needless to say that put a damper on things.
People have been doing evil shit for money since the invention of money. These days it's just automated.
Uh that’s new doctor time
I'd call my former Dr's office and flip my shit. Them giving out your info may have been a HIPAA violation. You should really follow up and harass the fuck out of them.
Don't normalize this
load more comments
(1 replies)
At some point we need to start criminalizing shit like this and actually holding people accountable.
load more comments
(18 replies)
view more: next ›