What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs).
Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge cases that are tricky, but overall the situation doesn't seem too fraught.
You start conservatively, and set up a watchdog to investigate loopholes and punish those abusing them. Fund an astroturfing campaign? Congrats, that's 10 years and a hefty fine to fund the continued operation of the watchdog. You can make promotional material and publish it, but it has to be clearly labeled and opt-in, not bundled with access to something else. The problem isn't small-time promotion that's difficult or impossible to crack down on, it's that we've built a whole attention economy. So long as we make it a bad value proposition for big players we'll have succeeded.
The argument you seem to be proposing applies to any policy whatsoever. "Well, you have to convince people to vote for you and your policies". Ok, sure, that's what's being done.
My point is, that process of convincing is advertising.
So they'll only ban non-political advertising... until they decide your movement isn't political for the purposes of the laws. It's too obvious, and too tempting, a cudgel for any government to have.
Political messaging is more than TV ads and mailers. There are rallies, online groups, town halls, organizing, basic human communication stuff.
---
The way we reign in government isn't by having no rules (the argument you're making reduces to "any rule can be weaponized against political opposition"), it's political checks to ensure weaponization doesn't happen. Or put another way, there is no system of rules that constrains a regime defined by its rule breaking.
That's likely to be the case anyway, because politicians are rarely willing to restrict themselves. The US Do Not Call list has an exception for political spam.
(See also: why the two biggest political parties are unlikely to support better voting systems.)
There are other (democratic) countries with restriction on political ads. For the ruling party it isn't as bad as they got other means (official government communication etc.) while advertising is mostly needed as a tool for the opposition for being able to bring topics on the agenda.
The United States government is not allowed to regulate commerce unless it is interstate. So it defined interstate commerce as anything that substantially affects interstate commerce. Did you cut down a tree in your backyard and use it to make your own pencil with your own labor? That kept you from buying a pencil that might have been made in another state. Interstate commerce.
Did you just represent an idea, and did I pay you with my attention? Advertising. Prison.
You are being needlessly obtuse. If you are not going to at least pretend to be acting in good faith, then you just shouldn't comment at all.
> The United States government is not allowed to regulate commerce unless it is interstate
This isn't true even in the slightest. You are thinking of the Commerce Clause (Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution), which states that Congress has the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, between states, and with tribes (which are kinda foreign nations).
This does not state that the Federal Government cannot define what is legal and illegal. This is done pretty regularly. 24 states have legalized weed and 39 have made it available for medical use, YET it is still illegal under federal ruling and these dispensaries get raided by Federal Agents routinely. There is no violation of the Constitution here.
And remember, law doesn't work like code. It needs to be interpreted with intent. The letter of the law is imprecise and is not meant to be absolute. If you know what someone means, don't derail the conversation as if you have a gotcha. You're welcome to request better language, but you don't "win" by misrepresenting what is well understood. We're trying to communicate, not exploit software.
Is that supposed to be a gotcha? You campaign. Talk to people, spread your message. You don't buy ads, you hold rallies. Encourage supporters to talk to friends and family. Do interviews. Is your idea of political participation limited to purchasing Instagram ads?
This is all very simple to dostinguish: did you pay or have any other kind of contract with the person talking about you/your product? Then it's an ad, and could be made illegal. Are you just talking to people and hoping you'll convince them to talk to others in turn? Free speech, perfectly fine.
If I'm in green tech can I set up a charity whose goal is to raise awareness of the problems of climate change and what we can do to fight it? I'll claim that I really care about it and that's why I'm in the solar business in the first place.
I mean… that means you can’t hire people to get signatures for petitions for the very thing you’re trying to get passed. I think their point is pretty fair.
Money for advertising is already a super sized network effect, making it difficult to challenge incumbents unless you're already rich,
Look, it's a radical idea and on its face, all at once, is impractical at the moment. So I suggest rather than pointing out the myriad of holes like shooting fish in a barrel, you give it the benefit of the doubt and roll around the ways it could work in your head. And what your online/offline experience would be if it were even 10% effective.
It already is that effective in a lot of the world with stricter advertising laws, and as a Canadian I do find the levels of advertising in the us landscape to be jarring. So there are examples
Money is much easier to combine though. You can convince 1000 people to each donate $100 and now you have a sizeable amount to run a campaign. Convincing _and coordinating_ 1000 people to each talk to five neighbors is _much_ harder, and much less effective since the messaging will be all over the place.
Strict regulation of ads is one thing, outlawing advertising is another. There are places that don't allow billboards and other street-level advertisement, but that's a long way from outlawing advertisements in general.
I get that it's a nice idea to many, but I follow a general rule of adding extra skepticism if the problems of some approach are absolutely obvious and the response to pointing them out is "don't worry about, that'll sort itself out, let's just do it". Especially when the collateral damage might be huge and the energy feels like "this will save us".
Companies holding rallies is fine, as long as people outside the rally, in a public space, are not unwillingly confronted with ads. Organizing flash mobs as a way to do marketing should indeed be illegal if ads themselves are illegal.
All Advertising is Marketing, but not all Marketing is Advertising.
I think the distinction should be thought of as Marketing (not Advertising) is to inform customers that opt-in to the information. Usually, marketing (excluding the Advertising arm) is for the benefit of a willing participant, where-as Advertising is for the benefit of both the willing participant and also the Advertiser (& advertising media) against an unwitting participant/user.
An example could be a product, company, political candidate's website that has a calendar for upcoming events, information pages about the product, etc. This can include tacky graphics and UI/UX, or even strategic language to stand out and show "personality". What it can not have are advertising boxes for unrelated advertising injections that the user did not go to the website to learn about. That would then be a Marketing site with banned Advertisements. The same for the Marketed product, they can not Advertise on unrelated media; basically inserting itself against the users will (the Advertised product being placed/injected/"forced" upon the person/user).
Stop being so pedantic. Everyone knows what the topic is about. "Ban advertising" is the goal and not the policy itself. Start with the obvious and unambiguous examples if you still want to act like this. Do you still disagree?
It's all about scale, really. In France advertising for political parties is very restricted. We don't get to endure the kind of insane propaganda Americans have.
How exactly does it work in other countries but the US?
There's very little outside advertising in Sweden, for example, and mostly restricted to cultural advertising. Road shoulders belong to Traffic Authority, and all advertising and billboards are banned there, so you won't see the insanity pf billboard after billboard here.
So how did Sweden do that? By political will and persuasion perhaps?
Political advertising also adheres to certain rules. And while there's a lot of it in a few months before elections, it's still surprisingly contained compared to some countries
In the UK there’s a lot of screens on pedestrian walkways, and small adverts on roundabouts but very few motorway (highway) adverts.
On the motorway there’s signs for services (rest stops) with all the major brands logos on, and maybe one or two billboards every 30 / 40 miles outside of city centres, then more as you come into a city centre.
I’ve also recently noticed a massive vertical screen on the side of a building near a busy interchange in my city (Manchester).
Public transport is littered with small adverts - on underground’s / metros there’s a lot of posters on escalators and buses have a lot inside, plus usually a big banner on the side (or a full skin of the bus but they’re fairly rare at least in my city).
Political advertising is capped at £20 million per party, but our newspapers do most of the real political propaganda come election time in terms of what stories they cover / who they endorse in their editorials (or sometimes they allow a major candidate to write one). The BBC also lets all parties with some traction do a 5 minute party political broadcast.
When I’ve watched some live US TV channels I’ve been amazed by how many “Vote X for Y, paid for by Z PAC” adverts there are and am thankful UK parties can’t spend anywhere near the same amount.
Billboards being rare outside of the US seems quite incorrect. The developing world is full of billboards, and places in Europe like Milan have some wild Samsung billboards.
Anecdote: If you are driving through Canada and start seeing billboards beside the highway, you are very likely crossing a native reservation. Billboards are generally banned but native communities have more direct control over their own land use and so regularly operate billboards.
(Billboards also also reasonably good as sound reflectors, reducing the highway noise in the community if positioned properly.)
The UK, outside of cities is largely devoid of bill boards a la the US. Milan is not "Europe" either!
I have driven/travelled across a lot, nearly all, European countries and the other one - the UK.
You do not get those huge screens on stilts anywhere that I have seen in Europe, that seem to be common across the US.
To be fair, I've only driven across about 10 US states. However, I do have Holywood's and other's output to act as a proxy and it seems that US companies do love to shout it from the hill tops at vast expense and fuck up the scenery with those bill board thingies.
Try driving around La Toscana and say Florida. I've done both, multiple times and I'm a proper outsider. I love both regions quite passionately but for very different reasons. FL has way more issues in my opinion but we are discussing bill boards so let's stay on task.
Billboards require power as well as the obvious physical attributes. They are an absolute eyesore and in my opinion should be abolished. Turn them into wind turbines and do some good - the basics are in place.
However. I know FL quite well. It has a lovely climate (unless it is trying to kill you). Florida man almost certainly invented air conditioning and FL man being FL man took it to the max when confronted with a rather lovely climate.
FL man is a thing and it turns out that CA Pres. can be weirder than anything seen before.
US - remember your mates, we remember you as is and don't hold you accountable for going a bit odder than usual for a while.
> I do have Holywood's ... output to act as a proxy and it seems that US companies do love to shout it from the hill tops at vast expense and fuck up the scenery with those bill board thingies.
This reminded me of learning the Hollywood sign was literally an advertisement (shouted from the hill top) that turned into a cultural landmark
On to the point for the topic, parts of Asia (mid/large cities) are overwhelming with their advertisements which I don't think the US or EU/UK can compare either
My first thoughts: You might be able to make those bill boards synonymous with imperialism of some sort. That gets you loads of negative connotations for free.
Digital billboards, sure, but traditional static billboards only need power if you want to light them at night. My guess is the majority of billboards in the US are unpowered, since it's so much cheaper. (Though likely not the majority if you weight by daily views.)
In Amsterdam there are posters at bus stops, roughly similar-sized billboards by the side of the road, some of them are video screens. There are video screens at train stations at well. At busy highway interchanges there are towers with billboards on top, strongly lit at night. It may not be as bad as in the US but there is advertising like this in most major cities in Europe.
I'm not sure what your argument is. I thought it was "they've done illegal things before", to which I'd say "backroom dealings aren't the same as a huge sign basically saying 'look at me breaking the law over here'", but that's so trivially obvious that I'm sure your argument can't be that.
That is requiring advertisers to set the HTTP evil bit. If advertising is fine, they're happy to make it obvious that something is an ad. If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement. I'd be surprised if banning billboards caused advertising budgets to drop.
> If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement.
Advertising already makes extensive use of astroturf campaigns and product placement.
Cable TV started out with no ads, as a major selling point over broadcast TV. Then they started advertising because they figured they could make more money that way. There's no reason to believe that advertisers will ever refrain from introducing ads when there's money to be made by doing so.
Are they happy? They resist any legislation to label things as ads and want them as unobtrusive as possible. They take over the platforms while there’s still astroturfing and sponsored content charading as regular content.
If we ban billboards at least the the countryside will look nice
In theory, anyway, billboards are prevalent sans regulation because they’re (among) the most efficient forms of advertising. That is, if the advertisers would only be spending some money on astroturf campaigns and product placement instead of billboards, it must be because they’re less effective than billboards - otherwise they’d just put that money towards the astroturf campaigns and product placement in the first place.
So banning billboards makes advertising less efficient. In theory, anyway.
If you step on a nail you'll be less efficient at walking for a bit. Causing random harm to people isn't really the basis for a reasonable system of rules. The regulators could cause random harm to advertisers. Society can cause random harm to anyone. You're not going to make consumers (or anyone else, for that matter) better off.
I'd much rather be fed efficient advertising on a billboard than have to worry about more astroturfing, that stuff is insidious. Cure substantially worse than the disease once advertisers have to deceptive and have even bigger incentives to hide than they already do.
And much as the anti-ads people want to skip the point, nobody ever even established that advertising is a negative thing that advertisers need to be harmed for.
Oh really? We banned billboards here in Maine in 1978ish, and you know what we don't have? Insane attempts to get around the law! There's an occasional person hired by a shady political organization to drive a couple trucks with signs on them around, but that's already not allowed by the law, it's just poorly enforced, and it's very rare.
Agree, that'd totally work - things like "billboards" or "ads on public transport" are possible to define and regulate. Advertising on the web would be much harder, I'd like to hear a good proposed rule on that.
Sadly, a post titled "A proposal to restrict certain forms of advertizing", and full of boring rules will be much less likely to get 800+ points on HN.
something like 80+ percent of texas cities ban them or are phasing them out with heavy new restrictions.
for example, in dallas, if you want a new billboard, you have to tear down 3. and new ones have placement and size restrictions.
houston is no longer allowing any new off premises signage including billboards. the only way to erect a new billboard is if it passes permitting and the company tears down one of their old ones.
and like i said, like 80% of texas towns across the state have heavy restrictions on new or outright ban them.
santa fe effectively has a ban on all off premises advertising which obviously includes billboards.
billboard are banned on highways in the entire country of Norway, including urban/suburban highways.
I've seen Billboards in Honolulu, Houston, Dallas, and Washington DC within the past 2 years. I haven't been to Santa Fe recently but they had billboards the last time I was there.
There are many smaller billboards visible when you use Street View in Google maps. Sao Paulo may have fewer billboards, and no large billboards, but it still has billboards.
How can you say this about my experience? For example, in Wood Green, North London, I can only remember seeing a single billboard, on the side of an off-license. Where have you lived where they are all around the place?
I detest a lot of modern forms of advertising as much as the next guy, but at the same time I think we'd be choking off a lot of interesting and enriching human expression by trying to remove it entirely.
I find it super interesting reading about goat and human sacrifices done by past cultures. It was a genuinely fascinating part of human culture, that humans thought that could help appease the gods to fix the weather, etc.
Just because it was done in the past, and is interesting to learn about, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t outright ban it.
That’s exactly right. Even if ad banning isn’t 100% doable, we’d be better off with it done 80%.
All-or-nothing thinking is so common in HN that it’s seriously over-complicating simple problems by trying to find a perfect solution. Such an ideal solution is rarely necessary.
Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge cases that are tricky, but overall the situation doesn't seem too fraught.