| HN Mirror

You are right that there is a difference. I don’t believe we agree on how different they are. I consider political speech to be an extremely common, almost impossible-to-define type of speech. So hard to define that it becomes dangerous to try to eliminate it in certain circumstances.

Journalists often work on behalf of organizations, both for-profit and non-profit. Those companies have the freedom (your mileage may vary in your country) to report on whatever they like, and in many cases, say whatever they like. And I can see why journalism seems like the ideal “alternative” to advertising, but it’s also hard to define/limit, without killing it.

In your ideal scenario, “journalists” are allowed to interview and write an article about a candidate to get the word out. They can say positive or negative things about that candidate. That’s not “advertising” though. Cool.

Imagine candidate A is running on a platform of “increase taxes on apples” an I think we should raise taxes on bananas instead. Which of the following activities are allowed in this political-advertising free country? 1) writing a blog post about my opinion 2) posting on hacker news comments about my opinion 3) submitting a link to Hacker News about my opinion 4) running for office myself 5) accepting donations from other people who agree with me 6) starting an independent magazine called “Fruit tax weekly” 7) paying employees to help with the magazine 8) selling the magazine 9) giving the magazine away 10) standing on a street corner and telling people my opinion 11) paying to rent an auditorium to give a speech 12) putting up a poster about my speech 13) writing a Mac app for my magazine 14) paying for advertising of my Mac app in the App Store 15) paying someone to put up a poster about my speech 16) studying to become a fruit tax journalist 17) writing an article about bananas 18) running a full page ad in a newspaper that just says “I hate bananas” or “bananas are bad for you” 19) write an article in my magazine about candidates that are for or against the Apple/Banana tax 20) have my magazine accept donations 21) link to an article that someone wrote about me 22) paying to advertise my blog 23) paying to advertise the article someone wrote about me 23) paying to advertise the article someone wrote about my opponent ——

Some of the answers are probably easy. But it’s easy to imagine exploiting most of those activities to circumvent the “ad” ban.

If we ban “political ads”, we don’t just get rid of “those annoying ads I don’t like seeing on TV and the internet, that are hard to define, but can’t we all agree they are annoying?” You put a chilling effect on many forms of speech, even the ones ostensibly allowed. You also chill the ability to speak about the ban itself.

And if the answer to the above questions centers on anything that rhymes with “we’d have a government agency/tribunal that determined whether something is political speech or not”, I would argue you’ve created a censorship machine controlled by the people that are currently in power.

This becomes especially scary when you replace the apples vs banana tax with something that you consider more concerning and consequential.