Ads are harmful, no doubt, but I do not think they are more harmful than the normalization of gambling in our society.
'I watched an ad, and then [my entire life was destroyed]' is quite hard to imagine, unless it's an ad for an MLM, crypto, entrepreneurship scam, or gambling.
On the other hand, I absolutely know people who started out in soft gambling who then proceeded to throw their life (and sometimes families) away trying to catch the next high with higher and higher stakes gambling until they lost everything, and then some.
We also don't really know the impact gambling is going to have in the near future. Loot boxes, online gambling, internet celebrity gambling, etc. really only became popular around ~2010 or later, and the kids who have been growing up with low-risk gambling as a daily accessible thing on their iPads have not come into adulthood yet.
'I watched an ad, and then [my entire life was destroyed]' is quite hard to imagine, unless it's an ad for an MLM, crypto, entrepreneurship scam, or gambling.
On the other hand, I absolutely know people who started out in soft gambling who then proceeded to throw their life (and sometimes families) away trying to catch the next high with higher and higher stakes gambling until they lost everything, and then some.
We also don't really know the impact gambling is going to have in the near future. Loot boxes, online gambling, internet celebrity gambling, etc. really only became popular around ~2010 or later, and the kids who have been growing up with low-risk gambling as a daily accessible thing on their iPads have not come into adulthood yet.