Day: June 18, 2019

Playing off gender stereotypes to sell stuff is now explicitly against the law for advertisers in the UK.

Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority announced the ban in December, with a six-month buffer period before it went into effect. And that announcement came shortly after the ASA published a 64-page report on how gender stereotypes in ads “can lead to unequal gender outcomes in public and private aspects of people’s lives,” citing public opinion and various experts.

The report was prompted by a series of widely reviled ads in the UK, including those for a Protein World weight loss drink marketed with …

Facebook doesn’t have much consumer trust. But it does have a hell of a lot of consumers.

And that’s enough to make Libra, the new virtual coin that Facebook is announcing on Tuesday, the most consequential cryptocurrency effort undertaken in several years.

Cryptocurrencies can be used to digitally pay for goods and services, like a credit card, and to transfer funds, like Venmo. So far, most people haven’t adopted them as a common form of payment. The most well-known virtual coin, bitcoin, has instead functioned more like an investment asset. But Libra has the potential to become a way …