Freedom From Advertisements
We Need a Grass Roots Movement Dedicated to Freedom from Constant Advertising
I spend too much time trying to avoid ads. It’s impossible. I drive down the street and encounter billboards every mile. I walk into a grocery store and see posters for streaming services. I listen to publicly-funded radio and still hear ads every few minutes. And then there’s the internet.
You can try to fight the onslaught of pop-ups, autoplay videos, and page-long images. You can use ad blockers or avoid the worst of these websites. But, there’s only so much you can do. We’ve come to accept that the Internet will be filled with distracting ads. We’ve sort of learned to filter them out.
Advertisements are not just annoying facts of life. They cause real problems. In the past, people more readily recognized this and regulated accordingly. In a better world, we would have fewer ads. We don’t need to wait for fully-automated luxury space communism for this to happen.
The Downsides of Ads
At a baseline, ads are annoying and that should count for something. They have also changed the way we read. It’s one reason why people process information differently on screens. We skim and jump around. We changed our reading in order to deal with a cluttered visual landscape and it has hurt our comprehension.
Being distracted by ads can also be dangerous. Areas with digital billboards have increases in traffic accidents.1 We also know that ads are harmful to children and adolescents. Ads are associated with worse child-parent conflict, unhealthy behaviors, and negative body image.
Other than the effects of commercials on children, there are almost no studies on the effects of ads. One of the only studies on the topic, conducted in the EU, found that the higher the ad revenue in a country then the more unhappy the citizens became. The authors believe this could be due to ads convincing people that they need things they don’t have. No one knows for sure though. More studies are needed but they aren’t being conducted. The assumption that ads are an inevitable part of modern life, or that they are just nuisances, has led to few studies on the effects of ads.
There is one major exception to the gap in ad research. There are tons of studies on how to make ads effective. Advertising executives know how to convince people to buy things even when they don’t want them, need them or are able to afford them.
Policy Solutions
There is precedence for banning or limiting the influence of ads. Globally, there are many places with strict laws around where ads can be or what type of ads are allowed to exist. Even in the US, there are places that limit ads. There’s also historical precedent for banning ads for certain products or that target certain groups.
Restrictions on ads includes those that ban or limit billboards. Fours states completely ban billboards in order to preserve their beautiful landscapes (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont). Many regions outside of these states ban them outright or limit their number and size.
There are numerous examples of policies that restrict advertising in regards to children. It has long been recognized that young children are unable to understand whether something is an advertisement. The federal communications commission (FCC) used to be much stricter on what types of shows and ads were allowed on children’s television programs. During the 1960s to 1970s, the FCC did not allow shows that were “program-length commercials” (i.e. any show that was made primarily to sell toys). Now we’re at the point where children’s shows and even mainstream blockbusters won’t get made if there isn’t the potential to sell toys.
Deregulation of advertisements on prescription medicine is another example. The US is one of only three countries in the world that allows advertising of prescription medication. That only became the case in 1997.
Reversing deregulation of advertisements would be an excellent step in the right direction. However, going back to old laws is not enough. We also need solutions for new problems in advertising that digital technologies have created. Generative AI has excellent potential in creating mass, personalized ads. It’s already begun. The better the technology gets then the worse this problem will become. And that’s just one small piece of the problem with digital advertising. There’s also problems with data tracking, addictive algorithms, secretly branded content and others issues that need policies designed by people who understand modern technology.
Limiting Ads Needs to Be a Major Political Issue
The biggest barrier to structural solutions will be that all companies want to be able to advertise with no regulation. Only a grassroots movement could stop this. The reason I have hope on this is because everyone hates ads.
Among the general public, the main barrier will be addressing how people think about ads and freedom of speech. Historical laws may be one way to convince people that limiting ads is consistent with free speech. It would be difficult in our current legal environment to reverse deregulation of ads, but perhaps a larger movement can be built from the growing public support, and existing policy, on regulating advertisements to children in online spaces.
Another potential approach could be to focus on a freedom from advertisements. It is becoming increasingly harder to do anything in modern society without being bombarded by ads. Perhaps, if there was more awareness of the negative effects of ads and research on the topic then people would be more willing to fight for spaces where no one is trying to sell you anything.
What we need people to realize is that constant ads don’t have to be a permanent fixture of modernity. We need freedom for our own sanity and safety. We need to ask politicians how they will fight for our freedom from ads and vote accordingly.
Advice on Limiting Ads in Your Own Life
On an individual level, there are things you can do to limit how much ads influence you and reduce the number you see.
When it comes to the Internet, you can use online services that limit data tracking. Personally, I’ve started using DuckDuckGo as my main browser/search engine and Proton Mail for email. However, there are plenty of other services out there.
You can check out the deGoogle movement, which is about finding alternatives to Google services since the company is notorious about selling personal data.
You can pay for the ad-free versions of certain services. This costs money up-front, but this can save you time, attention, and potentially, money. Free is almost never free on the Internet, at least not anymore. If you aren’t paying personally then most likely you’re paying with your data.
Avoid social media as much as you’re willing. All the major social media companies are experts at selling you things. Most of them don’t have options to get rid of ads either.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You don’t need to fully deGoogle, quit all social media, and live in a shed in the woods. Any amount of effort can limit the influence and number of ads in your life.
Fortunately, one of the most effective things you can do is learn about advertising tactics and be critical of them. Personalized ads are less effective for people with privacy concerns. So I hope that just by reading this you’ve become a little more resistant to advertising.
Trying to research the effects of billboards was fascinating. There are conflicting results over whether billboards are too distracting to drivers, but the regulations/studies are certainly biased due to pro-billboard lobbying. I say that because I came across some pro-billboard websites where the authors harshly criticized the idea that billboards could be dangerous.