Hacker News Reader

Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

In Norway it's forbidden with political ads on TV. Reasoning being that live images can have a huge influence, while also possibly being inflammatory and dumb down the debate. But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.

However, this law hasn't been updated in decades. So it's still only TV ads that's illegal. So it feels like a quite arbitrary restriction now.

Not saying it should be illegal on other media as well, but I do like the idea of it not being the size of your pockets determining the election. I guess that would be hard to police anyways now, with how influencers can sway stuff without it being an "ad", or how algorithms drive you into a rabbit hole of tailored content anyways.

View on HN

Kind of new in the US, you can't stop people in the US from spending money on ads that amplify there speech. [1]

Political spending is regulated, but we now have "political action committees" that can support candidates but can't coordinate with them. They can accept money from anyone in any amounts. Its brought tons of money from wealthy doners into polics in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Comedey Centrals Colbert Report (Colbert playing a Conservative pundit) once set one a PAC with a political lawyer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colbert_Super_PAC

I'm not a lawyer..

As someone who is "swing state adjacent", and avoiding them mostly this year, I feel for those under the crush of political ads.

PACs can now coordinate with campaigns! What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve spent years blocking them or their source sites wherever they show up. It’s been surprisingly effective over time.

> But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.

I think the main reason for rules like this is because it's literally politicians and political parties shoveling huge amounts of cash to the media, and 1) one of the purposes of the media is to inform people about politicians and politics, and 2) the politicians who are elected will oversee the media and their mergers. An intimate relationship is created where democracy demands an adversarial one.

It's rotten. It's the same reason no media can criticize any drug in the US, since they were allowed to advertise to the public. I'm sure there's some value in having people ask for specific drugs from their doctors, but that's minimal; the main value is being immune to any criticism unless an e.g. television station wants to lose 20% of their income.

Also media outlets are free to propagandize all day. You can't restrict that because we don't want to restrict freedom of the press. But then that begs the question, don't all companies and individuals have the same freedom of the press that media companies do?

This is the most shocking part from an outsider POV. In Europe* mainstream media must obviously be neutral about each candidate but also give the same amount of airing time to each candidate. So like if candidate 1 is invited for a 10 min interview, candidate 2 must be invited too and offered the same airing time. Meanwhile here Fox can just call Harris "stupid" (and CNN reciprocally call Trump whatever they want), lie to make them look good/bad and support their candidate all day long while spitting on the other one, and it's fine.

Edit: my bad for generalizing all countries of Europe

How much do they have to be "neutral" when there are multiple candidates with significantly different popularity?

If there are three candidates polling about equal then okay, it's easy to be neutral. But what if they're |40, 35, 25| or |60, 20, 20| or |55, 40, 5|?

When does a minor candidate drop out of their neutrality? I'm not saying the general idea is bad but just pointing out that neutrality is kind of a vague concept. It's a bit like giving climate change deniers equal airtime with serious scientists.

I don't know if I follow you. My point was that TV networks can't do propaganda for a candidate, i.e. they can repeat the policies of each candidate (without giving you their opinion on those policies and trying to convince you if it's good or bad or modify them) and fact check what they say, but they can't tell you who to vote for or blatantly lie about them. Hence they are neutral. Meanwhile here Fox will just tell you to vote for Trump to save America and that if Harris wins she will turn America into communism, and millions of people are watching and believing it.

If that's what the Fox presenters truly believe, should the government be allowed to censor them?

And this is the crux of the issue.

Most countries don’t have the pretense of free speech, and media is heavily regulated to be ‘fair’ (which means different things in each country).

It has pros and cons.

This is certainly not true for the mainstream media in all of europe. It might be true for public television stations in some countries.

Not in Poland. Before the last election we had 100% partisan media with the public media campaigning for the ruling party and the opposition controling the private media. Both had the Fox News/CNN/Pravda levels of objectivity showing a strange propaganda version of reality.

In Spain, public TV must show a list of parties with a minimum same time for even the tiniest craziest parties several times a day. After that, they are free to keep doing their thing.

But the biggest parties can buy more time by several subterfuges. In resume they can pay somehow for receiving a special treatment. Every politician has a market value and TV programs always compete for showing adds to the most eyeballs possible, so they will try to fill their programs with the more popular politicians 'for free'.

If I'm not wrong, private channels, funded without public money, can show people making pancakes all day it they want, but they will also try to maximize their advertising revenues.

The real reason of course is that the political establishment wanted to protect themselves from competition. They can control printed media within the country, but had no control over broadcast television, which could be beamed from a satellite. Due to the restrictions on press freedom in Scandinavia, commercial TV stations used to be based in the UK. A parliament member in Sweden even suggested a ban on satellite dishes at the time, when the first non-government TV channels started broadcasting.

> But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.

This is not the case. Electoral authorities could oblige all broadcasters to give every candidate a certain number of minutes of broadcast time. That's how they do it in other countries. To hilarious effect sometimes.

How are TV ads any different from MDG posters or the AP ads at bus stops? We allow the latter in Norway and they're not that much cheaper than TV ads.

They're different as in a video can influence you much stronger than a poster. But maybe you misunderstood me, my point was that the way we have it today isn't necessarily good either. Just curious about how one can give people good information, without it being too inflammatory, and without making an election a race about who has the most money.

No, I agree with your remark completely but I'm still ambivalent about the tradeoff.

We agree there should at least be one medium of advertising for political parties. But where do we draw the line?

For instance, I would be happy with making all ads plain text, standard font and size so that the ads won't abuse human attention by showing bright colors, happy images etc.

Reasoning being that live images can have a huge influence

Adding some context here - TBane stations (the subway) in Oslo have posters that show live videos - usually static images with dynamic attention-grabbing effects but sometimes full blown videos too.

The population of all of Norway is substantially less than that of the New York, LA, Chicago, or Houston metro areas.

The scale of these markets or the spending related thereto is not comparable at all.

What is your point?

Comparing what works in one with what works in the other is meaningless at best. The idea that any of these concepts could be generalized between the two is silly.

I didn't say it worked, rather I said it kinda doesn't because it's so limited compared to where people get their ads nowadays. It also wasn't really meant as a comparison, more of a segue into a discussion around if the huge ad spending and influencing is good or bad.

Ah, scale-ism. ;-)

I can't instinctively imagine how the size of a nation could realistically impact the results of this particular decision (banning political ads). Could you perhaps propose a realistic theory?

Well, there's an enormous amount more money to be made in the United States with political advertising, so you're going to get a great deal more pushback from advertisers on any such attempt /s

:-)

Could any of these metro areas ban political ads on TV locally?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com