alt Hacker NewsHelp me understand. The UK government basically said that parents are not responsible enough to make dietary decisions for their children so the government needs to step in and do it for them?
Does that not seem like an overreach? Its not like 4 year olds are driving to McDonald's by themselves and ordering burgers. The parents are the ones being targeted here.
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Children are totally targeted. They will ask their parents and put pressure to buy them stuff. Maybe even the parents who don't cave in can be relieved of this.
In the longer term, stuff that enters your brain as a child shapes you and lasts long. See how well how many people in their 30s remember ads of their childhood.
Why would someone defend such ads anyway? I don't believe they achieve anything good for anyone except the advertiser.
The UK is so far gone with government overreach at this point. They don’t seem to mind.
They're not prohibiting anyone from feeding these things to their children. A lot of people will continue to do so.
The government would have to spend a lot of money on counter-campaigns to keep the public well informed and it probably wouldn't have the desired effect on children.
Finally, and this is a very important point for me, children cannot enter into business deals/contracts; commercials are business proposals; hence there should be no ads targeting children.
>The UK government basically said that parents are not responsible enough to make dietary decisions for their children so the government needs to step in and do it for them?
Stand outside any school gate in the UK and you will see that the majority of parents "aren't responsible enough to make dietary decisions for their children".
I'm fairly relaxed about it simply because this is a response to the behaviour of these corporations.
They should keep reaching and ban the rest of the ads.
That's a great way to frame the whole thing if you're a corporation trying to sell junk food I guess.
In reality, this law is only about advertising, specifically about making it slightly harder to target children with advertising for junk food in a country that already has a serious problem with obesity.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. They banned certain advertisments at a particular time of day. They didn't ban parents from giving their children whatever thet want to give them.
Do you have children? They're targeted with ads everywhere. You can be a responsible parent but these things cause unnecessary stress. Quite frankly if the government wants to ban all advertising I would be thrilled.
... No, that's not what it says at all.
The level of reading comprehension on this website really is astonishingly low. It's about restrictions on advertising, not bans on products.
It's more "we don't want corporations selling unhealthy junk to have direct access to influence super-impressional kids" - cause guess what, in that case? You can be a perfectly responsible parent dietary-decision-wise, but have your kids whine and complain constantly because the kids aren't informed about the problems of it and just want the tasty shit they saw all the ads for.
Would you allow salespeople into your home to pitch your kids on stuff all day if they were in-person instead of on a screen?
Why not complain about the overreach of irresponsible companies trying to convince kids who have no way of knowing better to start damaging their long-term health?