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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

Jumping straight to prohibiting certain messages and / or their delivery is shocking to me. Free expression (even from vile creeps like Ronald McDonald) and public health are both important.

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Tobacco and alcohol advertising is already heavily regulated. Makes little sense why these same standards should not be applied to food, especially when obesity's impact on society is far worse.

I want to suggest that it was also wrongheaded to censor tobacco and alcohol advertising.

Is it ok to censor porn ads in kids TV programs?

In a mature and thoughtful society, with robust communities committed to stimulating and attentive care for kids, yes I think it's preferable to take a super conservative approach to censoring content and instead to spend enough time directly with kids (our own and those of our friends and neighbors) to help them navigate the minefield of content that exists in the world.

I am hopeful that that's the world we're cultivating.

I'm sorry but it's not clear to me - do you mean that in that case censorship is allowed, or not?

In case it wasn't clear, my point is that no-censorship-whatsoever just can't work in the real world. You always have to draw a line somewhere.

Why?

I think that in order for our world to be peaceful and tolerant, we need to be extremely restrained in what expression we use the heavy hand of government to censor. I don't like tobacco or alcohol advertising, but I want to be able to live in a society with content I don't like (or even that I find dangerous) and still be healthy. I think that's important for the information age.

I'm a pretty strong supporter of free speech, but I don't see how it's relevant when you're talking about the speech of corporations.

This seems like a shockingly naive viewpoint given what we know about human susceptibility to advertising.

Consumers consider consider themselves too smart to be fooled by advertising, and yet advertisers spend billions every year because they know advertising works.

It's that gap in understanding that makes advertisements insidious.

We all agree that this is the problem, but the elusive solution seems to be the field on which we disagree.

I prefer to take an extremely restrained approach to state-backed restrictioins content and instead focus on empowering people to recognize when they are being manipulated and resist being fooled.

My concern is that the state-based censorship approach won't last long into the information age, and that if we haven't developed robust protections within our communities by then (against the full exposure of "bad" content) then the effects may be worse for the wear.

The naive part, then, is the idea that we can develop robust protections within our communities. At the risk of invoking "think of the children," our communities are ever-evolving, and the most vulnerable members are replenished regularly.

I'd love to believe that we could, as a community, make wise choices, but reality demonstrates otherwise.

I'm very much loathe to grant the government yet more ability to restrict content, but there is no doubt that television advertising bans on alcohol and tobacco are effective[0], so I definitely understand the desire to enact similar restrictions around unhealthy foods given their societal costs. I think the line is too fuzzy for me to be comfortable, but I'd rather go that direction than re-introducing tobacco advertising knowing that doing so will result in a reversal of the positive benefits.

[0] https://www.nber.org/reporter/winter04/saffer.html

The first amendment only covers political speech. The government can and does censor things like profanity and pornography (there’s a reason why you can’t say “fuck” on the radio). Advertising isn’t political speech and wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be protected. Considering that advertising is basically psychological manipulation to get you to buy products, especially products which directly prey on your lizard brain things like hunger, I see no reason not to censor junk food advertisements. It worked with cigarettes.

Not true, the first amendment is about more than political speech. See this article for a little of the history of free speech:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/two-con...

[Note in particular: After all, the genius of the First Amendment lies in bringing isegoria and parrhesia together, by securing the equal right and liberty of citizens not simply to “exercise their reason” but to speak their minds.]

> The first amendment only covers political speech.

This opinion terrifies me. I'm grateful that so few people, including those in a position to decide on government restraint (ie, SCOTUS, etc), agree with you.

In your ideal world (where the text of the 1st amendment is interpreted as you propose), how do you prevent the government from simply labeling any speech it doesn't like as "non-political" and then censoring it?

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