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Well, you have to convince people to vote for you and your policies. How would you do that? How exactly would that work?

• idle_zealot 2y ago
  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?
  • msla 2y ago
    Rallies aren't advertisements, now. Well, I suppose that's one loophole. It isn't as if companies can't hold rallies. It isn't as if flash mobs don't exist. And "spreading your message"... what do you think going viral is, exactly? What is "viral marketing" to you?
    • chii 2y ago
      "What _I_ do isn't advertising, because _I_ have the public and society's interest at heart!"
    • tsimionescu 2y ago
      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.
      • snowe2010 2y ago
        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.
        • idle_zealot 2y ago
          Correct, you can't hire them or offer an award. You can ask for volunteers, relying on a smaller group of supporters built by word of mouth.
          • luckylion 2y ago
            That'd be the supersized network-effect, making it close to impossible to challenge incumbents. Except by tricks "well, you provided free coffee to your volunteers, that's a form of payment, you're all going to jail".
            • jbeninger 2y ago
              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
              • luckylion 2y ago
                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".
      • concordDance 2y ago
        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.
    • lodovic 2y ago
      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.
    • verve_rat 2y ago
      Note: the proposal being discussed is to ban advertising, not marketing.
      • singpolyma3 2y ago
        How are those different in your opinion?
        • 1659447091 2y ago
          Not the OP, but one way to look at it is: 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).
    • asdf6969 2y ago
      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?
  • singpolyma3 2y ago
    How do people find out about the rally?
• Chinjut 2y ago
  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.
  • msla 2y ago
    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.
    • tsimionescu 2y ago
      No, convincing is not advertising. Mein Kampf is not an ad, as abhorrent as it is.
    • JoshTriplett 2y ago
      > So they'll only ban non-political advertising 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.)
      • johannes1234321 2y ago
        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.
    • camgunz 2y ago
      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.
• simgt 2y ago
  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.
• troupo 2y ago
  I find these types of questions infuriating. 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
  • tennis_80 2y ago
    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.
  • realo 2y ago
    Exactly! Here in Canada it is illegal to advertise tobacco products. It is also illegal to target young children with toy ads, etc... So far no one objects, on the contrary. No one wants to overthrow our government because they deem it totalitarian or think it curtails free speech. So... one more data point.