Without trying to make a particular point for or against your point, I'd argue that alcohol is most definitely not 'pull', even in a time where overt advertising for alcohol appears to be regulated.

Alcohol is extremely difficult to avoid, for various reasons. Primarily social, but to a lesser degree in entertainment. In the same way that once upon a time the cool actors smoked (and sometimes they still do), drinking is still omnipresent in film/tv.

I'd say this supports your perspective, but mostly I just wanted to point that out. Alcohol is definitely nowhere near close to being a 'pull' sort of indulgence.

I think this is an issue of what is meant by the term 'pull'.

I used it to refer to physical consumption of alcohol, and by analogy spending time browsing the internet or similar. I'd quibble that the way you're using it would be more appropriately termed 'exposure', and then you could roughly equate social situations where alcohol use is prevalent to websites that expose you to a deluge of information.

This might seem like needless hair splitting, but I think it's core to the point I was trying to make. Exposure to alcohol at a social event isn't a problem for me - a non-alcoholic - because alcohol is pull (ie no one is actively coercing me to consume it). But that's irrelevant to an alcoholic, for whom exposure itself poses a problem.

Similarly, no one is forcing me to browse social media or navigate through to the next clickbait headline. But for some people, mere exposure is sufficient to cause this - they fail to successfully self-regulate their information intake.

So then to complete the chain of analogies, the article is about the power of employing such a deluge of information in a motivated manner. Depending on how nefariously this is done, we might compare it to anything from regular advertising (open and obvious), to product placement in movies (subliminal), to historical cigarette advertising prior to regulation (open, but usage is harmful to health).