SHOULD COMPANIES BE ALLOWED TO ADVERTISE BASED ON EMOTIONAL VULNERABILITY?

You’ve probably noticed that once you search something up on your browser, you see ads for related or the same product popping up everywhere. While it may seem harmless when you’ve been searching for a makeup product or some new shoes, the implications change when your searches are made at a vulnerable state. Whether the user is searching for a health-diagnosis or trying to find answers from a pregnancy-scare, those searches are made with a sense of fear, a sense of desperation. When brands use these searches to target advertising, it’s different; rather than profiting off of a user’s general materialistic desire, the ads are profiting off of a user’s emotional vulnerability. To put things into perspective, in real life, it means the difference between a salesperson noticing your interest in a product versus a salesperson noticing you’re crying and using your emotion as an advantage to close a sale. 

Let’s start with the case AGAINST allowing this kind of targeting this time. Ethics generally believe that it is wrong to use someone’s emotions as a means to an end to close a sale—specifically Kantianism. A controversial example of using someone’s emotions as a means to the end is the leaked Facebook documents in 2017 which revealed that the platform could identify when the users felt insecure and use that data to most effectively put out ads that could profit off of the teens insecurity at the right time. Secondly, these ads can aid predatory-adjacent industries that purposefully prey on people’s insecurities and scam them. For example, body-image-related searches have reportedly led to higher perceptibility to weight-loss or diet scams due to search-based advertisements. 

Now, let’s move to the argument FOR allowing emotionally-vulnerable targeting. The first argument is that having this kind of targeting can actually be beneficial to the consumer. For example, an “am I pregnant?” search would give the user ads for pregnancy tests, prenatal vitamins, and other maternity resources almost immediately, which can actually be helpful for the user as they get immediate and easy access to resources when in need. There’s another argument that is quite popular, but also adult-specific. When an adult receives targeted ads, it is known that adults have their own autonomy; adult consumers are perfectly capable of evaluating and dismissing ads when needed, and by removing these ads, we deny them agency to make their own purchasing decisions, especially if these ads could be helpful at times. 

As per the usual routine, now that I’ve presented to you both sides, I’ll leave you with a few questions to think about. Is all of targeting harmful, or just some types of targeting? If only some types, which ones? Would a regulation banning ‘sensitive’ targeting categories truly work?