Re:Facebook Morale Takes a Tumble Along with Stock Price
by cyphar on Thursday November 15, 2018 @12:01AM
(#18456976)
Several countries have similar blackout rules. In Australia there's a blackout from the Wednesday before election day up until after election day (which is always on Saturday).
These rules only apply to paid advertising by political campaigns and select broadcasters, and so your discussion of free expression and so on is not really relevant.
In Australia the blackout period only applies to radio and television advertising, while online advertising just requires the person who paid for the advertisement's address and name to be provided with the advertisement.
This seems like the kind of law that is fundamentally unenforceable if the Internet exists in the first place. The ability to circumvent arbitrary restrictions on free expression used to be considered a good thing about the Internet.
Yeah, "fake news"--except that has more to do with the cost of publishing news than anything. Back when most people consumed TV news and it was expensive to run a TV network, there was less fake news, at least until TV networks became cheap enough that they could segment the market by bias. During the heyday of newspapers, there was a ton of fake news, except they called it "yellow journalism".