Advertisements
Advertisements, as they exist right now, and considering the nature of most of them, are a form of socially accepted psychological abuse. Everywhere you go there are ads, making sure you don't miss out of the newest product to consume. Most people accept the pretense that ads are just an postulate of life, which one just has to live with - mind you, the almost a half of Internet users don't have an adblocker installed, and that obviously only accounts for those ads, that can be blocked with regular adblockers, bought articles and video sponsorships get through anyway, as do shill posts on messageboards. Ads are mostly made by groups of malicious, studied psychologists, whose whole job is to abuse the mind of people for so long that they feel like their life is worse, because they have not consumed a certain product. In children's TV there is advertisements of children having fun with friends, having a loving family, and, most importantly, only being happy because they bought a certain product. Similarly, advertisements for old people emphasize a caring family, who wouldn't let rot their elders in a nursery home isolated from the world, only sitting in front of a TV, being manipulated by ads. The young people are on the Internet, and so are the ads, and they are even more manipulative and harder to avoid than those in the train, supermarket, or TV. A lot of modern ads are based on fears that people developed. "Your data is being stolen by supergiga-h4xx0rgs and the CIA, if you don't buy a N*rdVPN or Expr*ssVPN subscription", as if "leaking" an IP address would literally kill you. The same applies for cloud-based password managers, those "data deletion services", less commonly "anti-viruses", and other scams, that solely rely on people being frightened by the consequences of not buying a certain product, and not understanding the nature of the technology that those products work with. While the the more conservative ads try to instill a perceived lack in something in you, the more disgusting ads work on the fear of the people. "If you don't buy THIS PRODUCT, CONSEQUENCES will happen". Those people making those ads are subhuman scum and should be held responsible for the abuse they perform on everyone, most of it completely involuntarily.
Nobody is immune to propaganda, nobody, not even (You), and this is why ads are so malicious, because even if you think you're above all of that, you still get influenced by it subconsciously, influencing your thinking, and thus your future decisions and choices.
Honorable Actions
- Developing, recommending, using, and preserving Ad-blockers
- Not giving data to advertisement companies, and actively poisining their data
- Telling people in your proximity that they are okay without consuming some advertised product
- Similarly, warning people about how a lot of these products are scams (pro-tip: if the concept of the product is something completely unheard of, you probably don't need it)
- Damaging the reputation of companies, who advertise their scam products