| ▲ | thesmtsolver2 10 hours ago |
| How will you ban that without infringing on free speech. That is a thing in the US and a lot of countries outside the EU. |
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| ▲ | Funes- 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| "Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever. |
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| ▲ | nickff 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Could one not categorize material published in a book, magazine, or on television as 'commercial speech', liable to restrictive licensing and censorship? This seems like a slippery slope which the USA is on the correct side of. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Commercial speech is not the same as advertising. The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product. | | |
| ▲ | nickff 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree that commercial speech is not the same as advertising, but the comment I replied to was talking about restricting commercial speech, not advertising. |
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| ▲ | phyzix5761 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 99.9% of businesses in the US are considered small businesses. If we look at all the businesses in the world small businesses make up an even larger percentage. In most parts of the world these are people with 0-5 employees; meaning they're just families and individuals trying to make ends meet. If you remove the ability for these people to advertise there goes their livelihood. I understand the desire to want to punish big evil corporations but all this will do is strengthen them because they're the ones who have enough capital to survive something like this and scoop up the marketshare left behind by the millions of small businesses that will fail when this is implemented. | | |
| ▲ | NeutralCrane 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 99.9% of small businesses do little to no advertising. I can’t recall seeing an ad for a single one of the small businesses I am a customer of. 99.9% of ads I get are for megacorporations and national brands. | | |
| ▲ | phyzix5761 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I know people who do moderation for the advertising side of social platforms and they say that more than half of the advertising submissions are done by small businesses. They said that the estimate is around 90% of small businesses use internet advertising in some capacity. There's a bidding mechanism, though, so more big business ads may be shown; especially if you live in a populated region. But that's just a numbers game. |
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| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm kind of curious how people think a new business should make its existence known to prospective customers. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's 2026. We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media. We can have reviews, genuine, in websites. We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships. We can search on our own initiative and go to their website. We can have online catalogs. And tons of other ways. | | |
| ▲ | tomnipotent 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | And not a single one of these is tenable, even when combined. How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place? Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works. | | |
| ▲ | tforcram 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Tenable for what, global business? Many local businesses do fine without advertising and/or using these methods. Making global business harder and forcing things more local actually sounds like a great benefit. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm all for that as well. We could use less 1T companies and more a few billion or 100s of millions level companies too. I miss the "focused on Mac and iPod" era Apple. | | |
| ▲ | Matticus_Rex 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Banning advertising would have the opposite effect; entrenched players would have a massive moat. The biggest gains from advertising by far accrue to newer entrants, not the big companies. |
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| ▲ | coldtea 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place? The follow industry conventions, visit registries of industry websites, have professional lists where companies submit their announcements (and not to the general public) and so on. >Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works. If advertising is banned, it will work just as good as for any competitor. |
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| ▲ | mrob 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Searchable catalogues of products with prices and features listed. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | That assumes the customer is aware that the product exists. | | |
| ▲ | mrob 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It only assumes they are aware that the category of products exists, and ordinary word-of-mouth communication is sufficient to propagate that knowledge. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | How does word-of-mouth communication propagate knowledge that is currently in the possession of zero existing customers? Or operate for products that people have little reason to discuss with other people? Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"? | | |
| ▲ | mrob 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | People don't need to discuss specific products, they only need to be aware of the existence of product categories. If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands. The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands. Now all of the "brought to you by America's <industry group>" ads are back in. So is every pharma ad and every other patented product because they don't have to tell you a brand when there is only one producer. > The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. Publication where? In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"? Also, who decides to publish it, decides what it will say or pays the costs of writing and distributing it? | | |
| ▲ | mrob 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | An industry group is not a disinterested party. Minimum competition requirements can be imposed. As I said elsewhere in the thread, a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > An industry group is not a disinterested party. No, but they can convince a disinterested party that people aren't aware of <fact about industry that industry wants people to know> because that's actually true. > Minimum competition requirements can be imposed. But that brings back the original problem. Company invents new patented invention, how does anybody find out about it? > a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed. This is the legislator's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this. If a proposal is full of problems and holes, the alternative isn't necessarily to do nothing, but rather to find a different approach to the problem. Proposals that are full of holes are often worse than nothing, because the costs are evaluated in comparison to the ostensible benefit, but then in practice you get only a fraction of the benefit because of the holes. And then people say "well a little is better than nothing" while not accounting for the fact that weighing all of the costs against only a fraction of the benefit has left you underwater. | | |
| ▲ | mrob 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Advertising causes great harm. Banning advertising, or better yet, making it economically nonviable without restricting freedom of speech, solves this problem. As already pointed out by several other posts in this thread, the purported benefits of advertising are already available through non-harmful means. But I acknowledge that there may be edge cases. My point is that the existence of edge cases does not mean we should permit the harm to continue. Those specific edge cases can be identified and patched. My suggestion is a hypothetical example of a potential such patch, one that might possibly be a net benefit. Maybe it would actually be a net harm, and the restriction should be absolute. The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched. Your objections to this hypothetical example are nit-picking the edge cases of an edge case. They're so insignificant in comparison to the potential harm reduction of preventing advertising that they can be safely ignored. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, the problem is that the "edge cases" will swallow the rule if you make an exception for every instance where advertising is actually serving a purpose, but if you don't make those exceptions then you would have created so many new problems or require so many patches that each carry its own overhead and opportunity for cheating or corruption that the costs would vastly exceed the benefits. > The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched. Only it turned out to be an example to illustrate how patching the edge cases might be a quagmire. |
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| ▲ | coldtea 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"? The same legit things that can cause them to realize it today. Word of mouth, a product review, a personal search that landed them on a new company website, a curated catalog (as long as those things are not selling their placements). An ad is the worse thing to find such things out - the huge majority ranges from misleading to criminally misleading to bullshit. |
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| ▲ | bdangubic 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | how did business do before the internet?! assuming people bought things before we had the internet? |
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| ▲ | BurningFrog 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They don't think of that. At all. Many don't think businesses should exist in the first place. |
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| ▲ | BurningFrog 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You make your feelings clear, but don't give any arguments for it. That won't convince anyone. |
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| ▲ | Xelbair 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| True, you can't separate ads vs sponsored content quite easily. but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking. Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns. |
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| ▲ | MBCook 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Magazines made it work for decades. Websites can too. If you know the kind of articles your readers like, you can find ads that your readers will like. | | |
| ▲ | andwur 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's amusing that after all this time and (hundreds of?) billions of dollars invested in adtech I still find the adverts in old magazines far more relevant and compelling than any of the "personalised" adverts of today. The industry as a whole has missed the forest for the trees by over-fitting their systems; I might be interested in the broader category, or a tangentially related one, but at no point do I want to see the exact same product I was looking at a day ago on every ad. I didn't buy it then for a reason, so I'm not buying it now. Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit. |
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| ▲ | skissane 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Free speech is a thing in the EU too. To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it. The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions. The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come. |
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| ▲ | nickff 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-right... > "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. 2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary." Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.... | | |
| ▲ | skissane 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law? The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both. But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is. | | |
| ▲ | nickff 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I can definitely imagine the Soviet Union making arbitrary rules about which genocides were recognized and ‘protected’, and which were not. | | |
| ▲ | skissane 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | But can you imagine a Soviet court declaring a law to be in violation of human rights? | | |
| ▲ | nickff 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, much like the EU, they would regularly over-ride the ‘opinions’ of their subordinate states. | | |
| ▲ | skissane 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The central party and state organs in Moscow would sometimes overrule decisions by the governments of the SSRs and other subordinate entities. But they didn't do this by having the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union declare laws unconstitutional. They did it by administrative fiat. |
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| ▲ | nxm 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | “Free speech” and yet people are arrested for mean memes | | |
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| ▲ | coldtea 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Easy: free speech was never meant for and fought for advertising. Any judicial body who says otherwise is bullshiting people. Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights. |
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| ▲ | terminalshort 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | A restriction on prostitution is absolutely a restriction on reproductive rights, but there is no such right in the constitution. |
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| ▲ | admadguy 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Outside of US free speech isn't the carte blanche it is stateside. There are guardrails, there are limitations pretty much everywhere else. Even in the US This militant application is fairly recent, post 1980s. |
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| ▲ | layer8 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It would be worth a try to outlaw compensation for advertising. The spirit of free speech is usually that you aren’t being paid for it. |
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| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising? The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols? | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising? Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when there's no payment or compensation of any kind involved for that. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's a corporation though. It can't do anything without paying someone to do it, unless someone volunteers to do it for free, which isn't very likely. And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | >And how do you self-host distribution? You have your own website and your copy on it. Don't start that "but if you pay some hosting provider to host that website that would be advertising", or the "And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that." that borders on being obtuse on purpose. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone, and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | >If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone Yes. You're still allowed to pay someone - for YOUR OWN corporate website. Still your copy is not on my fucking social media, news websites, forums, tv programming, and so on. >and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen. They can go into the hosting business all they want. If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law. What they host should only be accessible when somebody consciously navigates to it in some hierarchical scheme or directly enters the address/handle. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law. They're already hosting everything in your feed, and if there were actually no ads then everyone on the site would be paying them to do it, at which point what do you expect to be in your feed? | | |
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| ▲ | jason_oster 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Advertising is a monetary transaction between an advertiser and a publisher. The customer (or product) is not involved in the transaction; it is their attention that is being bought and sold. That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're contrasting authorship with distribution. The advertising equivalent to paying a technical writer is paying an ad agency to create the ad. The customer isn't a party to that transaction either. But now how are you distributing either of them? | | |
| ▲ | jason_oster 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am not making such an error. Paying a technical writer for labor is not the same as paying a publisher for conversions. The scenario you posed was "hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it." Those are two parties, each of which is paid independently for services rendered. The customer is not selling their attention, here. The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it. Advertising is not distribution. Publishing is distribution, and advertising sometimes comes along for the ride. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The proposal was to "outlaw compensation for advertising". That would presumably include paying people to create ads and not just to publish them, hence the first example. What you're arguing is that the first example is different from the second one, but they were intended to be, because they map to two different parts of the process. > The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it. Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product. And then the question is, how do they get it? There are many ways to distribute. They could pay to print it out on paper and put it in the lobby in their corporate offices, but then customers would have to come to their corporate headquarters to get it, which most won't do, so obviously some methods of distribution have a higher likelihood of being seen. Then companies will prefer the ones that allow them to be seen more. But they're paying someone for any of them, so "is paying for it" isn't a useful way to distinguish them. And then we're back to, suppose you pay Facebook to host your documents on your company's Facebook page. Furthermore suppose that they, like most hosting companies, charge you more money if you get more traffic. Meanwhile their "hosting customers" on the "free tier" (i.e. ordinary Facebook users) have a very small quota which is really only enough for their posts to be seen by their own friends. So paying them for distribution -- like paying for any other form of distribution -- causes your documents to have better visibility. Now you can show up in the feed of more people before you run out of quota, just like paying more for hosting means more people could visit your website before you exceed your transfer allowance. How do you tell if someone is paying for computing resources or eyeballs when the same company provides both? Notice that "don't let them do both" is a bit of a problem if you also don't let them sell advertising, because if they can't sell ads or charge for using the service then what are they doing for revenue? | | |
| ▲ | jason_oster 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Indeed, advertisers would layoff or displace their marketing teams, as the role would have no value to the company if advertising was outlawed (meanwhile, technical writers would be just fine). I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing the framing you put forth that equates advertising with technical writing. > Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product. I agree with this statement, but it is irrelevant. The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing. The test is quite simple: Is the sole purpose of the payment to make a sale? If so, it is advertising. We don't really need to discuss documents any longer. Documentation is not an advertisement. |
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| ▲ | layer8 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are legal definitions of advertising, I’m sure the courts will be able to figure it out. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | The "legal definition of advertising" is the thing you have to write into the law you want to enact. If you can't answer the question as the proponent of the proposal then how is a judge expected to do it? | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What the parent is getting at is it's not a mystery, such definitions already exist in all kinds of jurisdictions. In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended. We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it. > We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it. You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar? | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | >That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it. Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. I'd take a relative improvement even if it's not 100% over free reign. >You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar? I don't consider it a "hopeless disaster" (except in it's effects on society). As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. The existence of dark illegal versions of it, or exploitation in the industry, doesn't negate this. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. For the most part they're trash. There is a narrow range of effectiveness where the cost of compliance is low and thereby can be exceeded by the expected cost of reasonable penalties imposed at something significantly less than 100% effective enforcement, e.g. essentially all gas stations stopped selling leaded gasoline because unleaded gasoline isn't that much more expensive. The cost of complying with a ban on advertising is high, so the amount of effort that will be put into bypassing it will be high, which is the situation where that doesn't work. > As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. It essentially bifurcated content creation and distribution into "this is 100% porn" and "this company will not produce or carry anything that would cause it to have to comply with those rules" which inhibits quality for anything that has to go in the "porn" box and pressures anything in the "not porn" box to be sufficiently nerfed that they don't have to hire more lawyers. The combination of "most human communication now happens via social media" and "expressing your own sexuality is effectively banned on most major social media platforms" is probably a significant contributor to the fact that people are having less sex now and the fertility rate is continuing to decline. "All the boobs you could ever possibly look at but only on the sites where there is no one you will ever marry" is not a super great way to split up the internet. The ambiguity in the definition frequently causes people to be harassed or subject to legal risk when doing sex education, anatomy, etc. when they're trying to operate openly with a physical presence in a relevant jurisdiction. Conversely, it's the internet and it's global so every terrible thing you'd want to protect anyone from is all still out there and most of the rules are imposing useless costs for no benefits, or worse, causing things to end up in places where there are no rules, not even the ones that have nothing to do with sex. It's now being used as an guise to extract ID from everyone for surveillance purposes. It's a solid example of bad regulations setting fire to the omnishambles. |
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| ▲ | layer8 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’m saying that these definitions already exist, and are being appllied by courts. It’s not a novel concept. I’m also not interested in arguing about exact definitions. We all know well enough what an ad is, in particular the kind we don’t want to see when browsing the web. My main point was to illustrate how I don’t consider this to be a free speech issue. |
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| ▲ | terminalshort 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The spirit of free speech is that I can say whatever I damn well please for any purpose that suits me including that someone paid me to. |
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| ▲ | mrob 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You don't need to ban advertising, you just need to ban paying for advertising. That doesn't harm free speech. When there's no money to be made the problem will sort itself out. |
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| ▲ | initramfs2 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's gonna probably just create a bunch of loopholes or hacks like paying with favors instead of cash | | |
| ▲ | mrob 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Loopholes can be addressed on a case-by-case basis. A solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem completely unaddressed. | | |
| ▲ | MBCook 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | This by the way is my understanding of why the EU writes laws the way they do. If they just banned infinite scrolling someone would come up with something equivalent that works slightly differently. Now they need a whole new law. It’s just constant whack-a-mole. So instead they seem to ban goals. Your thing accomplishes that goal? It’s banned. It’s a pretty different way than how we seem to do things in the US. But I can see upsides. |
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| ▲ | coldtea 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's the same in every domain when there's a profit. Doesn't mean laws and bans don't reduce the related activity dramatically. |
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| ▲ | WinstonSmith84 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm not following the relationship - because you'd have to pay, thus it's not "free" speech? It's hard to argue that having to pay a minimal fee (of let's say $1 per month) would be something against free speech. But the payment shall remain anonymous obviously. |
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| ▲ | Barrin92 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >How will you ban that without infringing on free speech You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity. |
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| ▲ | whackernews 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What are you on about? Who’s speech? The speech of a massive multinational corporation? No thanks. I want the freedom to browse without getting pointless products shoved down my throat. |
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| ▲ | BrenBarn 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I'd say the first amendment is due for an overhaul anyway for a variety of reasons. (Heck, the whole constitution is.) |
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| ▲ | initramfs2 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You can't say something like that and refuse to elaborate | |
| ▲ | whackernews 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which parts specifically? | | |
| ▲ | BrenBarn 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Obvious examples of negative consequences of the first amendment include the profusion of false and misleading advertising, the scourge of political campaign spending, and the disastrous firehouse of misinformation being pushed out in various online forums. The idea that an abstract carte blanche for free speech outweighs those real and present ills is misguided. At the same time, we see that the limitation to only protection from government action enables effective quelling of speech by private actors. At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept. | | |
| ▲ | bigstrat2003 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think you would find that the cure is far, far worse than the disease. We speak of rights, and those are important, but there's also a very important practical reason why we have freedom of speech: because you cannot trust that future government officials will stick to banning speech that is justly banned. Once you open that door, sooner or later someone is going to start abusing the power. How would you like it if the Trump administration was able to (with complete legality) declare that claims Biden fairly won the 2020 election are "misinformation", and punish people who make those claims? Or if you're a Trump guy, how would you like it if the next Democrat administration declared it to be "misinformation" to claim that Trump fairly won the same election, and punish people for it? The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal. | | |
| ▲ | BrenBarn 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The thing is that that same argument can be used to justify just about anything. If the scum of the earth is in power, they will ignore whatever rights you thought you had put into the constitution anyway. We are seeing that now. And I am already cursing the day that we decided on the restrictions we currently have. The Trump administration is declaring with complete legality that Trump won the 2020 election and is punishing people who believe that. Right now they're not taking the direct route, but it's abundantly clear that government power is being used to punish people who say things that Trump doesn't like. There is no way of listing rights on paper that can protect you if truly evil people get into power. But there are ways of listing rights on paper that can allow good people who believe in those rights to defend them in ways that involve preventing evil people from getting into power. Free speech is not a magic bullet in either direction. |
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