Advertising is misinformation. At best it's the top-down pushing of claims instead of them emerging bottom-up -- something inherently hostile to efficient social epistemology. The day will come when "advertising" is broadly treated like a crime.
Today we run the internet on it.
@rechelon marketers criminalise themselves, platforms turn a profit, we ignore the ads and benefit.
@rechelon
I would never approach it in terms of efficiency, or ethics in terms of crimes, but yup, the whole practice is built around getting people to do things they wouldn't do if you were just informing them. Then people treat subliminal advertising as though it crosses some line in the sand, instead of just being the logical conclusion.