by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-28 06:45:05+00:00
I see your angle but I worry the "free will" premise sleep walks us into manipulation. People are vulnerable to the The Psychology of Persuasion (Robert B Cialdini).

My perspective might be a bit nannying but I think we're arguing the nation-building vs individualism axis and the free-will vs regulation axis.

For example, smoking has some benefits, its a cheap stimulent, helps you focus, good for people with undiagnosed ADHD. However its highly addictive and causes terrible long term health issues, so where do we fall on the line of its regulation? Should we allow everyone to persue their "free will" and advertising to be unregulated? Especially since tobacco companies have a perverse incentive to downplay and suppress the health costs, fabricate positive research and lobby governments. Last time we allowed that everyone smoked, that might be good for free will, but is that good for society, for nation building?

I'd make a similar argument for our addictive online services, I think they should probably be age gated and increasingly regulated. While they're beneficial for the US economy they're detrimental to the nation-building of all nations exposed to them.

I would ask you to consider how the internet would look if online advertising was banned. While its an unrealistic aim, I think that view is extremely informative to the idea of _actual_ free will. If you remember how the old internet looked, its clear how the profit motive has distorted the internet beyond recognition.

To throw up a more middle ground example based on a video I saw a couple of days ago: there's a popular "health food influencer" on tiktok who gives contradictory advice based on products he's promoting and their ingredients list. In January sugar is a terrible ingredient but in March its entirely fine. He's shilling via product placement and there's no regulation of his platform. If people lack critical thinking they just blindly buy these products and learn nothing about health. You might state they're exercising their free will, but is that genuinely true? Maybe he only obtained his traffic because he had no qualms about how manipulative his content was. Did he get his early numbers via botting and then ending up towards the top of the list? Perhaps he threw $20k at another popular influencer to spam mentions and that's how he got his early traffic. An entirely unregulated system permits this. If the money wasn't there the only people talking about health foods would be people genuinely interested who gave reliable advice. The profit motive creates this distortion because its profitable to be misleading and sensationalist. There is a nuanced conversation to be had around people being able to make money on the platform and dedicate a career to it and banning advertising doesn't allow that. Somewhere there's a middle ground, I'm not sure where that is but I don't think we're anywhere near it today.

If you want a genuinely dark example then look up subliminals [0]. Its a niche community of grifter adults and tragically sad children, where the children seem to be labouring under a bizarre misconception peddled by the grifters that by repeatedly watching a specially prepared video they can become taller or have a prettier nose.

[0] - https://reddit.com/r/Subliminal/