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Comment by exergy | Hacker News Reader

This level of pedantry drives me up the wall. Not everything needs to be invented from first principles.

Profile ads are banned, yes, because they involve teh candidates. Policy ads are banned because they again involve politics.

We can start anywhere! Let's say 'nothing from any entity that receives money from a political party'. Or 'anything mentioning election candidates'. Or 'anything with certain keywords in it'.

What you're not stopping to ask yourself is 'who are the kinds of people that need to advertise about politics'? Yep, exactly the kinds of dickheads you don't want polluting our information streams with their bullshit. Out with all of them!

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It's not pedantry at all. Look at F1's battle with cigarette advertising for a concrete example. Certainly, explicit advertising is easy to stop, but there are many ways of advertising things surreptitiously.

A great example of this is Ferrari's evolution to avoid the F1 cigarette ban. They started with the word Marlboro on the side of their car, then they moved to a barcode that resembled a pack of cigarettes, and now they are partnered with a front company called Mission Winnow (google it, it's really interesting) that is widely believed to be subliminal advertising for Marlboro.

With each such iteration, the advertising punch is diluted. At this point, it's a stretch to imagine someone seeing the mirrored M-W logo and going "God, I need a smoke". In this way, we are all the better for it.

What point are you trying to make? The system seems working as intended if Ferrari is going to such great lengths to avoid explicit advertisement.

There will always be those who break laws, doesn’t mean that we should stop making laws.

The point is that this is a policy that is hard to enforce because it is ambiguous. The system worked as intended if you think that the point was to make only the most well-financed and technically savvy advertisers able to receive a benefit.

Laws don't have anything to do with this thread?

> as intended if you think that the point was to make only the most well-financed and technically savvy advertisers able to receive a benefit.

Your argument is that breaking a law is expensive and only those with money can break it so why bother with laws. Beyond ridiculous.

The example you’re using is also not convincing. Statistically insignificant amount of people know or care enough to watch F1 races.

> The example you’re using is also not convincing. Statistically insignificant amount of people know or care enough to watch F1 races.

We have 1 user on the internet vs $1 Billion in advertising budget. I'm going to trust that Philip Morris is better at quantifying the effect here.

> Your argument is that breaking a law is expensive and only those with money can break it so why bother with laws. Beyond ridiculous.

This still has nothing to do with laws. It's an important distinction to make between laws and corporate policy because one carries very high punishments whilst the other is mostly without recourse.

My argument is in no way proscriptive. Only descriptive.

The example that you used was specifically in the context of corporations getting around anti-tobacco laws. Not corporate policy against tobacco advertisement, but laws. I stand by my assessment that its a bad example to make the point you're trying to make.

> It's an important distinction to make between laws and corporate policy because one carries very high punishments whilst the other is mostly without recourse.

I agree with this.

> The example that you used was specifically in the context of corporations getting around anti-tobacco laws. Not corporate policy against tobacco advertisement, but laws. I stand by my assessment that its a bad example to make the point you're trying to make.

This is mostly incorrect. There are _some_ countries where tobacco advertising laws are the reason for Formula 1's tobacco advertising ban, but the rule being circumvented is FIA's tobacco ban. Interestingly, in countries where tobacco advertising is illegal, Ferrari often changes their livery to not include Mission Winnow.

It's a real to life point. Live Action's prolife ads were taken down for being 'political' even though the ads have nothing to do with politics.

People not thinking things through, which, yes, means working them out from first principles, are why we have so many stupid and broken laws, policies, regulations, etc.

> Yep, exactly the kinds of dickheads you don't want polluting our information streams with their bullshit. Out with all of them!

I'm sure you'll be shocked and outraged when a story lands in a few months because someone you like is protesting this policy.

And you're going to tell me a bunch of anons on HN are bout to invent it from first principles?!

While 'we' (I'm not American) might have plenty of stupid laws, we also have some very good ones. We've gotten there by taking necessarily-flawed first steps. I have no doubt Twitter will overlook something. But I'm glad they're doing it anyway, and we will get somewhere better in steps. It's better than navel gazing about "What's a law anyway?"

Also, granted, GP didn't explicitly state that he's against the law, but this kind of smug, condescending slippery slope argument keeps getting brought up all over HN, hence my over the top reaction. So many thread seem to devolve into this kind of pointless "Yeah but define <> first" at the hands of Rationalists™ and are worse for it. They get nowhere and it makes for infuriating reading.

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