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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14081 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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I already answered most of your objections in my original post. Specifically, I wrote:

To clean up potential fuzzy boundaries (I'm sure I've missed a bunch):

  • Party A will presumably be some corporation. What if they hire another firm to build a website for them? Is that now illegal? No: because the website design is only given to party A. Party B (here the design firm) is not communicating with party C.
  • Is hosting a corporate website now illegal? No: because party C has specifically solicited the specific information by typing in the URL, following a link, etc...
  • Is posting a positive review of some product now illegal? Not if you didn't get paid for it.

So, direct advertisements (e.g. "marketing" copy posted on the company's own website for its own products) isn't covered by my definition at all and would continue to be legal (intentionally so).

And your third objection:

  • The weatherman isn't giving you the weather. He's giving it to the news station that is then broadcasting to you.
  • The maker of the bumper sticker gave the sticker to the car owner. They don't care what the car owner does with it and neither does my proposed law.
  • Branded clothing: this is an interesting point that I'll address below.
  • Political signage: as long as you're paying for the sign and not the other way around, this is again perfectly fine. Even if the sign was given to you for free, I would be fine with it. Again, the artist isn't giving information to others. He gave the sign to you. You're free to e.g. stick it in a closet never to be seen again. It is you who chose to disseminate the information by sticking the sign in your front yard.

Please think about these examples in light of the theory of harm that I proposed:

The underlying theory of harm is that party C is getting inaccurate information designed (often very well designed) to manipulate them into a decision not in their interests. Note that crowding out good information is also very much part of the harm. If C is getting good information from sources not paid for it, it is reasonable that these unpaid sources won't put as much effort into disseminating information as sources paid to spread information (which presumably won't be as truthful due to the conflicting interests from party A).

None of them (except the branded clothing example possibly) run afoul of it.

Branded clothing is a genuine gray area. If there was similar but non-branded clothing available from the same company that sold for more, I'd definitely consider the branded clothing paid for by the discount. But there often won't be and at least for the initial implementation, I think such cases would slip by. But branded products are easily one of the least egregious forms of marketing around.

Nonstandard forms of payment: is already something the legal profession (and industry at large) has a lot of experience dealing with for e.g. insider trading, bribes, trusted actors getting free expensive meals from sales people, etc... Banks for example have very extensive policies around limits to entertaining clients to "avoid the appearance of impropriety."

And finally:

I'm not sure I accept your premise that advertising is a net negative. There are certainly many things I have gladly purchased that I found out about through advertising. My intuitive sense is that ads have had a net positive or at least net neutral impact on my life, not a negative one.

I'm trying to be charitable here but this is just so far from my experiences that I have a hard time believing it. How often in a typical month do you buy something off of an advertisement? Something that you weren't already thinking of getting (or at least a generally similar product)?

The weatherman isn't giving you the weather. He's giving it to the news station that is then broadcasting to you.

This is a loophole you can drive a truck through. "Party B isn't giving unsolicited information to Party C. Party B is giving it to the broadcast station, who is then broadcasting it to Party C."

All you've done here is childishly blow the American tech industry's brains out because you think commercials are a drag. China will happily pick up the slack when no one wants to pay thirty bucks a month for Instagram or whatever, leaving you with nothing.

I'm curious if, in this insane scenario, it would become possible for global brands to advertise on streams based in foreign countries, for the purpose of targeting American consumers of those same goods located in America. The NFL becomes PPV in the USA, but it streams free live on TikTok, and Coca Cola and Apple (through their Chinese subsidiaries, of course!) run advertisements during the game.

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