The case for banning ads in social media

Pictures of Sao Paolo before and after banning billboards leads me to support this idea.<p>Some examples (with a couple bonus pictures of London removing billboards): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;clean-city-law-secret...</a>.

Social media banning ads is like a printed newspaper banning ads. The dollar and some you pay for a copy is for the production of the paper and delivery only. What pays for the journalists, the research and all are the ads. Why would they remove the ads? [1]<p>Unfortunately the newspaper industry didn&#x27;t have much of a say since advertisers found a more lucrative venue online. Now they are shutting down.<p>But social media companies have a say. You can&#x27;t tweet anywhere else but on twitter. You can&#x27;t post a rehashed picture with a motivational quote, and gain thousands of likes, anywhere else but on the facebook networks.<p>Social media is not a public utility. I think they should have all their ads.<p>My suggestion is to follow the less dramatic path of teaching people how to use the internet. I am serious. Most people don&#x27;t even know they are on the internet when they are on their phone.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;idiallo.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;we-never-paid-for-journalism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;idiallo.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;we-never-paid-for-journalism</a>

&gt; One could imagine going back to the old Whatsapp model of charging users $1 per year<p>Facebook has around 2.45B monthly active users. On a global basis, they would need to charge every user $28&#x2F;yr to make the same annual revenue. I&#x27;m not sure what studies to cite, but I think it&#x27;s relatively safe to say they&#x27;d lose a significant portion of their userbase if they started charging, and thus would need to charge a whole lot more than $28&#x2F;yr per user.<p>While I can appreciate the notion, there&#x27;s a zero percent chance any large social media platform like Facebook will ever ban ads.

I don&#x27;t find those takes convincing mainly due to the fact that authors never attempt to do a proper though experiment to test their own hypothesis.<p>Let&#x27;s imagine for a second, that US and EU governments get together and for real ban all ads on social networks.<p>The end-user product of Facebook &amp; Twitter majority of users interact with on a daily basis represent maybe ~20% of the tech that engineers are working on. The rest is some crusty under-the-hood tech geared towards collecting user information, selling&#x2F;targeting ads, and rearranging your feed in a way that maximizes time you spend on the site. If there&#x27;s no ads, all this tech is suddenly useless.<p>Facebook would immediately have to fire 80% of its staff. Its market value would plummet. They&#x27;d have to implement subscription model, that majority of users would immediately reject. Even if they accept a huge loss and allow people to use the site for only $5&#x2F;y, I imagine only 10-15% of currently active users will accept it.<p>Now when maximising ads is not a priority, people start spending way less time yelling at each other on social media. They need to spend this time some other way.<p>I&#x27;m too lazy to think further, but it&#x27;s clear that &quot;just ban the ads&quot; is a HUUUGE change that will affect so many things at once, that it&#x27;s almost impossible to predict all effects it&#x27;s gonna produce.

&gt; While almost everyone can agree that something must be done<p>I’m not sure that’s true. There’s a very strong correlation between people who think something must be done, and people who think they must be granted more power to control the flow of information across the internet.<p>As long as communication has existed, communicating false or misleading information has existed. The only way to combat it is with skepticism and critical thought. Trying to ban it is impossible, and establishing an authority to enforce the truth won’t decrease the amount of false or misleading information communicated, it will only ensure that all false or misleading information aligns with the views of the authority.

I don&#x27;t agree with the idea that banning ads would lead social media networks to become less addicting, which seems to be taken for granted. If twitter charged $1 a month (which has to be far more than they make from ads served to me), they are still incentivized to keep me on the site. Sure, they might not make marginal dollars from my eyeballs, if I quit then they make nothing. Even if it&#x27;s a one time purchase, they still want me there to draw my friends there.

Gun companies can&#x27;t advertise on Instagram, so they pay shills to do posts. In a world where social media ads are overall illegal, you&#x27;ll see wild contortions to skirt the law.

It&#x27;s funny to imagine the year 2024. There are millions of small fake worlds consisting of streams of events, videos, and conversations - a beautiful algorithmic balancer will keep each of these quasi-communities humming, guiding their participants through their day with lots of - engagement.<p>There&#x27;s a weirdo movement of people, who are not following one of the 50000 synthetic celebrities, that live and breath and adored by many.<p>Content generation will be semi-automatic, at least. And ads and non-ads will just merge more. The most targeted ad is one, that I do not even recognize.<p>I feel detached (not bad) today - I will feel alien (maybe bad) in ten years.

Why just ads in social media? It seems like you could replace social media with the mainstream media in this argument and it would make just as much sense.

You can&#x27;t get rid of ads. But ads should be transparent and it should be visible to all that X paid for an ad, sent it to Y group and said Z. That would prevent politicians from, for example, advertising to people on one side of an issue that he is on their side, and to people on the other side of an issue that he is on their side, knowing that neither group will see the other ad. Then they could keep people from doing new last-minute ads right before an election so they can&#x27;t sneak in whoppers before the honest press can catch them.

Personally, I think it&#x27;s more important to ban the tracking that ad companies engage in.

Here&#x27;s a personal opinion that might be wildly unpopular with entities whose revenue stream is primarily composed of advertising.<p>I work in network engineering for an ISP, which is a mid-sized regional ASN.<p>there is no reason why the internet needs to have advertising on it at all, for people to both make use of it and pay for it as end-user residential consumers, or businesses.<p>as an ISP that has both wholly-owned facilities-based last-mile services, and that uses third-party last-mile services, these are entirely paid for by the subscriber revenue.<p>Our revenue is also sufficient to pay for inter-city transport services, IP Transit upstreams, various colocation costs, and all of the infrastructure needed to connect to various IX points and content delivery networks.<p>Essentially, look at it as the same difference between Netflix, Amazon Prime, or traditional advertising-supported cable television.<p>Residential end-user internet service is now just as essential as having functioning water, sewer, or electrical grid connection. The monthly subscriber fee per connection when aggregated between dozens of thousands of individual endpoints, is more than sufficient to support a robust, redundant ISP that can pay competitive salaries to its staff.

There&#x27;s nothing inherently wrong with advertising. But if the business model is trade users and their data for advertising revenue, there&#x27;s no chance that the users&#x27; best interest can be served. That said, as someone working on social technology where we&#x27;ve expressly decided to not go down that path, it&#x27;s also clear that the dark patterns that an ad-driven approach lead to are also effective at driving growth. I&#x27;m curious how many people will pay rather than have their data collected and sold. My guess is that it takes more than just being ethical to charge for social tech, it takes adding extra value as a product as well. I&#x27;m betting my current career on the idea that there is an alternative.

Are adds in America totally unregulated or something? Why hold Facebook to different standards from anyone else?<p>And why are the people who complain about social media the most, also the people who use it the most? Sounds like they’re pretty happy with it when they can use it to push their agenda.

I think the solution is to ban the &quot;algorithm&quot; that determines your feed. People sign up for posts and photos from friends and family and groups, instead that is held hostage and released as a trickle with ads and fake endorsements (your friends like brandX) and targeted stories chosen to trigger emotions and go viral.<p>The feed should go back to being RSS essentially, that&#x27;s what people really expect out of fb&#x2F;instagram.<p>Also, just like government sets limits on roadside advertising, online advertising should be limited (area-wise or frequency), with clear distinction and attribution for all ads. In addition, there should be limits to profiling such that ads can&#x27;t be shown to less than 10K viewers for example.

A ban on ads would be great but would not to be a universal solution. We need anti-ad technology that works regardless of the legality of ads. Open source blockers should come pre-installed with browsers, operating systems, router firmwares.

I hate the idea of ads:<p>When you get around to the concept of using ad-supported media for &quot;free&quot;, you know where you left off. For instance, if you were willing to give up on ads, you&#x27;d make an explicit change to ban people from social media. It may not hurt them in the long run, but it&#x27;s certainly useful for people and probably also for advertisers.<p>This way, advertisers get more value out of advertising, and they don&#x27;t have a need for ads on other platforms.<p>The big problem is not that you don&#x27;t own all the content that you don&#x27;t own, but that many of your content is being used. That is not the same as blocking adverts.

I wrote a similar article earlier this month, about the (hopefully) ad-free, tracking-free future of social media: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@dfang&#x2F;what-will-next-gen-social-networks-look-like-a5fda90cffb7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@dfang&#x2F;what-will-next-gen-social-networks...</a><p>It really lines up well with your points about engagement, advertiser incentives, and political disinformation!<p>Here&#x27;s to hoping people choose to use&#x2F;build new social tools that better align with our interests and values.

I&#x27;d advocate a somewhat opposite direction. Require all the ad companies to show which ad is paid by who, and how much. This will probably kill some ads, but I guess some business still want to pay for the exposure of their products.<p>Personally I don&#x27;t think banning something or hiding something would work, because people will always find alternative venues. Preemptively pushing the transparency is the only way forward.

Maybe just stop making advertising a tax-deductible business expense. Advertising in the US is negative-sum - the population is mostly spent out, so it doesn&#x27;t create demand, it just moves it around a bit. But it adds to the price of products. In many cases, more than the price of producing the product. Tax policy should not encourage that.

It&#x27;s nearly 2020, why can&#x27;t I pay to get rid of Ads on Instagram, Facebook and Google? There must be a price where it makes sense to do this. It baffles my mind that there are billionaires out there who are being pestered by badly placed ads.

It’s kinda interesting that the response to social media ads is “ban them all” when the same targeting system could be used to inform and educate people on how to improve their station (and perhaps in the end, have more money to buy stuff).

It would become much harder for challenger companies to unseat incumbents.

Let&#x27;s fundraise to run a facebook campaign to ban all the ads then!

Why limit the ban to social media? I&#x27;m for a 100% ban on advertising in all forms across all media with no exceptions.

What will happen is that the ads will go underground. You&#x27;ll simply no longer know whether the person talking to you is an &#x27;ad&#x27; or really saying something they stand behind. To some extent this is already happening, but banning ads will push that to the limit.<p>Ads at least can be controlled by the platform to a degree with user generated content that is <i>much</i> harder because there is so much more of it.

Advertising is speech. The more exceptions we carve into free speech, the easier it is for governments to censor. It is authoritarian to dictate what one person can say to another. That authority may be justified in limited categories like threats or fraud. When those categories become too broad, the authority gains a hugely powerful tool to manipulate and cement itself in place.<p>I don&#x27;t think I have the right to get between two people and silence one of them, just because I think he&#x27;s trying to sell something.

Banning things tends to lead to the market routing around the ban, via black &#x2F; grey markets. In the case of ads is hard for there to be a true black market, because ultimately the ad needs to reach a users pupils. But I suspect if you outright banned ads you&#x27;d get a lot of grey area, such as promoted posts, affiliate messages, influencers. Things that blur the line between ads and content. Instead I&#x27;d prefer a high excise tax on advertising transactions, similar to how we tax cigarettes. That way it doesn&#x27;t ban advertising outright, but it does change the cost analysis on it, and it becomes a source of revenue for the state that (in theory) everyone can benefit from.