The tech giants’ diet is bad for everyone’s health

Sometimes, in my most misanthropic moods, I’m seduced by a libertarian approach to advertising rules. You know, just let it all out there. Let them go for it. Maybe you still try to prevent outright lies, but actually maybe you don’t even bother with that. Let them tell us that a McFlurry, say, brings eternal life and see whether doing so would really elevate sales even over the medium term – when the bloated corpses of the McFlurry gorgers begin to stack up.

And we’d be done with expressions such as “increases by up to” and “helps prevent” by which products’ efficacy can be almost infinitely exaggerated without a direct lie having been told. I think that might be refreshing, unless phrases by which false concepts are conveyed through an intricate lattice of literal truths turn out to be our current civilisation’s only lasting art form, with “not even a black hole can eat three Shredded Wheat” as the central masterpiece, brilliant because it is a lie made permissible only by the fact that no one is supposed to believe it.

Getting rid of the rules would be a “herd immunity” style approach, with all the short-term nastiness that implies. But, after a vast wave of total chaos in which lives were lost and destroyed, perhaps those who survived would have antibodies protecting them against bullshit? Maybe this is the step we need to take as the internet becomes a purveyor of ever more toxic and damaging lies and conspiracies. Credulity kills and the only known vaccine – education - doesn’t seem to work that well.

But then I have a sandwich and realise it’s a spiteful idea, really. And it wouldn’t work. The fertile ground for lies and conspiracy provided by the internet isn’t the result of a dearth of scepticism, but by scepticism as misdirected as a submachine gun that has been dropped while on auto-fire. The most evil liars are often those most strenuously exhorting people to be sceptical, but in a totally uninformed way that leads them to unquestioningly disbelieve the most reliable sources of information. When Trump dismisses all respected news sources as “fake news”, scepticism starts to destroy itself, like a body’s immune system suddenly turning on its kidneys.

I was thinking about this because of last week’s reports that Boris Johnson is likely to renege on his proposal to ban online advertising of junk food before 9pm. This provoked a letter calling on him to rethink his rethink, signed by 97 people including famous foodsters Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and supermodel David Gandy plus, less eye-catchingly, learned representatives of many prominent organisations including those dedicated to all the key ways of carking it: cancer, heart disease, liver disease, high blood pressure, etc.

The original plan was hatched last year as part of Johnson’s resolution to fight obesity, in himself and others, after his dicey period in intensive care with Covid, the severity of which is likely to have been exacerbated by his weight. So why the U-turn? Well, according to the Times: “Research suggested that it would lead to children consuming only 1,124 fewer calories a year and would cost businesses hundreds of millions of pounds.”

This brought out the sceptic in me. What is that number? If it’s really a projected average reduction in every UK child’s diet if the online ban goes ahead, that’s still potentially significant. If those children whose diets are currently unproblematic would be more or less unaffected, that frees up a much more substantial number of calories to be knocked off the diets of the potentially obese in order to produce that average.

Commercial broadcasters provide a cultural trade-off for problems adverts might cause, in a way the tech giants do not

And which businesses will lose hundreds of millions? If the calorific reduction is deemed so insignificant, the effect on sales must also be. And anyway provoking a reduction in sales of junk food is the whole point of the scheme, so that surely can’t be considered a downside. So presumably the hundreds of millions would be lost from online advertising. It’s money that won’t go to the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Sorry to be blunt, but surely that’s fine? Nobody cares about that, do they? Unless they’re shareholders in those companies? What important or valuable aspect of our society relies on the uninterrupted enrichment of tech giants? Absolutely none that I can think of. In fact, their continuing rapacious mega-prosperity is itself what threatens the fabric of our communities; more and more of our high streets are boarded up and our teenagers stuck at home tortured by self-loathing because of their interactions on social media. We don’t undermine an anti-obesity campaign in order to protect the revenue streams of corporations like that, do we? I really wouldn’t care if they all went out of business, but there is precisely zero chance of that happening.

Do you know who might go out of business? ITV and Channel 4. Proper commercial broadcasters rather than just redirectors of trivia and muck over wifi. For them, it looks likely that the junk food advertising ban is still going to apply. As one of them said: “It’s a handout for US tech giants that pay little or no tax in the UK while we’re being punished.” And it will drive more advertising online and away from companies that not only pay tax in the UK but also commission TV programmes watched and enjoyed by millions. These broadcasters provide some sort of cultural and entertainment trade-off for the problems that advertising might cause, in a way the tech giants, to my mind, absolutely do not.

You can make an argument for unrestricted advertising and you can make one for limiting advertising of damaging products in the interests of the common good. But what possible coherent argument can be made for allowing it online but not on television? Television is an industry in which Britain excels globally, but it has become a much more marginal business. Meanwhile, for the likes of Google and Facebook, the financial future could hardly be more secure, but the question of whether our societies are healthier and happier as a result of their existence is, at best, unanswered.