Ads & Waffengleichheit

I do not like advertisement. It wastes my time, it wastes customers money, it is annoying, yada yada yada. Not much new here.

But it also is unfair. The person I first heard this idea from (working in customer retention) saw a fundamental issue in the "Waffengleichheit" (German, lit. "equality of arms"), the idea that on the one side we have professionals using decades to centuries of industry research & the ressources of sometimes multi-billion companies, on the other side some individual just trying to live their life while being under near-constant bombardment by product propaganda.

With this unbelievable asymmetry an individualistic defense is simply not possible. Even if you yourself may consider yourself defended against this propaganda (you aren't!) I believe that society has a duty to defend it's vulnerable, not accept a status in which but the strongest can succeed. As advertisement is not going anywhere anytime soon this means: Controls, limits, and checks are required for advertisement, to at least curb the worst excesses.

Platforms & Content Creators

This includes a moral imperative for advertising platforms to control the 3rd party ads they run. This has been discussed to death for big platforms (advertisement networks, media platforms be it legacy or digital, social media platforms, ...) & I have no hope for actual change here in the current political climate. But you know who else is a platform? Influencers & content creators.

Where is the difference between your favourite youtube host taking a break from the videos content to talk to you about NordsharkVPN & the NCIS episode being interrupted to show you an ad for ... idk what ads run on TV these days, I don't even know if NCIS even still exists. There is no difference, it's in-stream advertisement probably unrelated to the topic & paid for with money.

Actually, that's not true. There is a difference:

• I know the youtube host reading the lines. I probably value the hosts opinion. I may even be watching this very video to obtain factual information. There may even be a smooth transition from the video to the ad, sometimes funny.

• I do not know the TV ad reader. I have no emotional connection to them. There (generally) is a clear break between the TV show & the ad break, not some "You know what else...".

This direct involvement makes content creators as ad platforms powerful. While parasocial relationships are risky & despite my misgivings about advertising in general this is not necessarily bad: Creators have a tighter relationship to & higher dependence on their consumers than (legacy) media networks, trust is a valuable commodity & incentive. In theory.

But this involvement also makes them responsible.

VPNs & false advertisement

This isn't just about VPNs. You can probably write this exact article about razers, mattresses, earbuds, underwear, data deletion services, meal replacements, ready made meals, nutritional supplements, ... . Oh god, let us not talk about coupon browser extensions.

Sidenote: I am looking forward to future historians dating media records from the current century based on the product category & brand name of the month.

But VPNs is something where I can somewhat claim expertise & as such call the most common versions of the ads misleading to just false, with the benefits from & need for VPNs being majorly overstated & associated risks being completely absent. I won't go through that here, this again has been discussed to death. I am also not going to get into the question if you should use a VPN. For this post I just care about the false advertisement.

It doesn't really matter where the false claims originate, be it with the product itself, some advertising agency or the creators themselves. It has been spoken in the creators voice.

Responsibility & Expertise

To which degree one should hold people & orgs responsible for mistakes is a complicated topic & there is no general answer. I generally believe that blame for individual human errors is mostly a bad idea & such cases should instead be used to identify & eliminate causes.

Sidenote: This has had me in the past clash with management at work about secret management & systemic failures, but that is a future blogpost...

Procedural negligence is not that.

Not checking the truth of the words you speak for someone else for money, as your income stream, is procedural negligence.

In a lot of criticism I read & hear about this there often is a disclaimer along these lines:

And I do not blame creators for whom this is outside their area of expertise, they can not know better.

I disagree. Yes, individual human mistakes may be made more likely by subject matter expertise. But this doesn't absolve the creator, this shows a hightened level of procedural negligence, in which the creator fails to compensate for their expertise. This is a structural failure.

Could I write a truthful ad for a VPN solution? I think so, yes. It may not make the VPN provider happy. Creators like Tom Scott have been walking an interesting line here, showing this can be done[1].

Could I write a truthful ad for a nutritional supplement? Not without significant research & consulting subject matter experts. This requires time & effort & potentially even incurrs monetary cost.

[1]: fwiw, I will hold this against him & other SMEs nevertheless. While these ads themselves do not contain falsehoods they serve to legitimize providers who otherwise use false advertising & whitewash their image.

I am not going to blame a creator that chooses to incur these costs & fails in the research - individual error, see above, but this should bring them to reconsider if they should operate outside their area of expertise, especially for topics where good resources on these issues are widely available. The issue of lacking Waffengleichheit applies here, too: Smaller content creator teams may not have the capability to check the information provided to them by a professional team of bullshitters who have been flooding the internet with misinformation for years. This doesn't just apply to the consumers.

I am, however, going to blame creators that choose not to incur these costs while taking the money. You are making this your own words. They are your responsibility. You are willingly neglitent.

Closing notes

What originally got me thinking about this was Reject Convenience, especially his Youtube videos. They are pretty good, overall, especially as starting points for frameworks for discussion of privacy topics with non-experts.

This post was written while listening to MASTER BOOT RECORD - IP. It's ok, probably not gonna relisten.