What Were We Thinking? The Top 10 Most Dangerous Ads

How we fought bad ads in 2015

Here are some of the top areas we focused on in our fight against bad ads in 2015.

Advertising is a cancer on society — Jacek Złydach

A detailed explanation of why I keep saying that advertising is a cancer on modern society.

Fake OpenAI Ads Appear on Subway: "Yes, We Built a Machine That Tells Teenagers to Kill Themselves… But It Might Also Help Them With Their Homework"

An artist in London plastered fake OpenAI ads inside city subway cars calling attention to ChatGPT's close ties to a series of suicides.

Ads and Ad blockers

Last time, we shared how ethical advertising works to keep Read the Docs sustainable without creepy ad targeting. This time, we will share about one of our biggest challenges with advertising. At the beginning of April, Read the Docs was added to one of the most popular ad block lists: the Easyli...

Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

More than 50 offending image and video ads were published across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or Threads, according to Meta’s ad library data. Some ran as recently as this week.

The Truth About Social Media as an "Advertising Industry," Bluesky's Gamble, and "Reclaiming Conversation" - Nightflight

Can We Ever Know If Online Advertising Really Works?

In the summer of 2003, Viacom executive Mel Karmazin managed to sum up old media’s horror of the Internet with one of business lore’s greatest vulgar...

Debunking the science of advertising

We delve into the world of advertising, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, to find out if it's really even that effective. A collection with 3 stories from The Correspondent.

Revealed: Tory ‘dark’ ads targeted voters’ Facebook feeds in Welsh marginal seat

Unregulated practice discovered after posts attacking Jeremy Corbyn drown out campaign aimed at boosting youth vote

What If We Made Advertising Illegal?

What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy itself. A thought experiment worth considering.

Meta Failed to Catch Hundreds of AI Child Abuse Ads. Some Included Images of Real Kids

Images of real children—including a member of a European royal family—were used to create some of the 350 ads containing child sexual abuse. Lawmakers say they plan to investigate.

Google subsidizing hate group’s anti-trans and anti-diversity ads

Google’s Ad Grants program subsidizes advertisements by the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Do No Harm, including sponsored search results for the group’s so-called “Detransitioner Bill of Rights,” according to a search of Google’s ad transparency data.1 Do No Harm’s model policy, the “Detransitioner Bill of Rights,” wrongly suggests that gender-affirming healthcare can “contribute” to distress among […]

Broken by Design - Ad Tech and What We Can Do About It

This is the first banner ad. Created for an AT&T advertising campaign in 1994 by Wired Magazine it is perhaps the most influential thing to ever happen to the internet. No single thing has done more to change, deform, alter, or make sustainable the web. When it launched, it had a 44% CTR - that’s...

Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain because they relate to feminism

Theatre told that Facebook and Instagram filter out ads mentioning ‘social topics’ such as civil rights or feminism