You've missed the point. It's not desirable to have listings which contain false advertising; the remedy for that is to restrict false advertising, not make every buyer chase the seller in a contract dispute after the fact. That would be insanity.

Nope, your comparison is just not equivalent. A sale is a transfer of property. We enforce the implicit contract that goes along with that. The buyer will pay, the seller will deliver, the product is accurate, etc. This discussion is about speech, for which no such contract exists. If you disagree, then you should have no problem arresting people for showing off a 3 watt bulb they claim to be 5 watts.

Holy false equivalent, Batman!

The poster's point was pretty simple: there is some speech which doesn't deserve to be fully protected to the highest possible level. Untrue commercial speech like false advertising is pretty much in that category. This is why we allow attorneys-general to bring cases against false advertisers, for example.

Usually the remedy is monetary damages, but injunctive relief is also available.

I can easily maintain that this is sensible and reasonable without "arresting people for showing a 3 watt bulb they claim to be 5 watts."

Is there a sale or not? If there's not a sale it's not advertising. If it's not advertising it should be allowed, false or not. If it is advertising it's not just speech. You lack the consistency to make your argument work. So again, I guess you're fine with arresting people over light bulbs.

> If there's not a sale it's not advertising.

This is a really strange perspective. Advertising is only advertising once the advertised product is sold? A billboard is simultaneously an advertisement and not an advertisement depending on whether the observer has purchased the advertised item?

Not the GP but no, I'm not fine with arresting people over light bulbs. I am totally cool with arresting them for fraud if it meets that standard. I am also cool with the business being fined or otherwise sanctioned for false advertisement. The product is beside the point. The deception is what the punishment is intended to address.

There’s an implicit conversion between intent to sell and actually selling. For there to be advertising, one of the two has to be true. If I’m showing off my car, am I advertising anything?

Strictly, yes..

If you show off your car you are indeed, by definition advertising it.

I know that's not the definition youre referring to, but the word does mean to call attention to, especially in a boastful or ostentatious manner.

But anyway, it's still advertising because the car has the manufacturers badges, it's just not first order commercial advertising.

If nobody has purchased the product, there is no way to evaluate whether the advertising is false, because there is no product to compare against the claims.

If I write in this comment that I will sell you a perpetual motion machine for $5, but I don't actually have one and I never attempt to take your money, am I guilty of a crime?

> If there's not a sale it's not advertising.

I just can't anymore with HN. Who are these people who are redefining common terms to suit their own views?

What am I redefining? Can you point me to an example of advertising without the intent to sell?

You've introduced this 'intent to sell' bit when for most of the thread you were requiring the transaction to proceed to a sale before the advertising can be advertising.

No one has claimed anything about advertising without the intent to sell. Indeed, that's been everyone's point since this bit of the thread started with michaelt's comment. Commercial speech is an area were most people agree that some constraints are useful. Hence it was used as an example of why censorship is nuanced not binary. People have different standards for what's reasonable and what's not, but only the most die hard free speech advocates would not have a standard at all.

You have frequently taken examples that are clearly in the advertising with intent to sell context and treated them as if they apply in a non-commercial context. This is how we get to you accusing people of being OK with arresting people over light bulbs when they're actually saying they're OK with laws against fraudulent advertising.

As I said in another comment, there’s a conversion between intent to sell and actually selling. The same way if you were against murder you’d implicitly be against conspiring to murder.

If you are selling or intending to sell something, and you choose to have it mediated by the government, whether or not you’re allowed to falsely advertise something has nothing to do with freedom of speech. We aren’t agreeing that censorship is allowed. Censorship isn’t voluntary.

But now YOU are deciding that “if a sale is involved, speech can be restricted.”

Why can I not decide “if it would result in people dying, speech can be restricted?”

I mean, if you told me I could only restrict one of these, then surely I would pick the second anyways.

No, I’m saying that if you decide to make a sale, and decide to have it mediated by the government by paying sales tax, then whether or not you get punished for false advertising has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Whether such taxes are voluntary in the first place is a different argument, but I think they should be. So there’s no inconsistency on my side.

It sounds like you have replaced a moral framework with a legal one. But the question of censorship is fundamentally a question of morality. It matters not how legal or illegal specific actions are in this discussion, so the legal means of enforcement that you rely on for your argument are a red herring.

Then you heard incorrectly. What I said is what I believe to be moral. You can’t arrest someone over non violent speech. Force is only justified in response to force. And at the same time, if you agree to enforcement you aren’t getting your rights violated.

Neither "enforcement" nor "arrest" carries moral content. But you use both terms freely in justifying your allegedly-moral position, unfortunately implying your conception of "rights" is one based only on those granted by an enforcement body.

It is hard to discern any moral content here, and I suspect there is none.

What? If I’m morally against using force to prevent non-forceful speech, why would that not also be my legal position?

Isn't the crime of false advertising in the failure to deliver what was claimed, and not the claim itself? You can very well falsely advertise your product however you like provided you don't actually sell it to anyone, because once you deliver them a product that isn't what you claimed, that's when the actual crime occurs.

> You can very well falsely advertise your product however you like provided you don't actually sell it to anyone, because once you deliver them a product that isn't what you claimed, that's when the actual crime occurs.

Is this the legal precedent or intuition? I'm cynical and am guessing that the advertisement is illegal as long as it presents in a commercial way, regardless of whether a sale had happened. Anyone know?

You are getting lost in the weeds of an imperfect metaphor.

But I have a perfect metaphor. Should it be illegal to post a picture of a 3 watt bulb, captioned as 5 watts?

Depends on the context. If it's part of an ad for a lightbulb you're actually selling, yes. If it's a stupid meme, no.

Advertising is speech; there is no sale.

If there is to be no sale, then is it really advertising at all? If I "advertise" that I own a thing with no intention of selling that thing, then laws about honest advertisement don't apply to me.

My car (not for sale) has a nuclear reactor and can travel through time.

yes

No, not in a sense that triggers truth in advertising laws.

If you advertise a product without intent to sell, you're also breaking truth in advertising laws: you're selling vaporware.

FTC

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/advertising-...

Counter-example:

> What can my company do if a competitor is running an ad that I think is deceptive?

> Explore your legal options under federal and state statutes that protect businesses from unfair competition. For example, the Lanham Act gives companies the right to sue their competitors for making deceptive claims in ads.

> Are advertising agencies subject to the FTC Act?

> Yes. In addition to the advertiser, the advertising agency also may be held legally responsible for misleading claims in ads. Advertising agencies have a duty to make an independent check on the information used to substantiate ad claims. They may not rely on an advertiser's assurance that the claims are substantiated.

I don't see anything about false advertising requiring a sale.

People can be victims of false advertising even if they don't actually complete a transaction with the offender.

“These other products give you cancer! Only use Febreze to mask odours in your home.”

viewer goes and tosses out all their presumably-cancer causing products, never purchases Febreze

In a similar vein, there is a "fruits and veggies" vitamins commercial that advocates skipping meals to afford the vitamins, as they give you all you need.

Not a lawyer but I could imagine a situation where you're in a store and you see an advertisement for a blue light bulb that says that blue light bulbs are proven to disinfect surfaces. You remember you have some blue light bulbs at home, so you go home and screw them in. Or maybe you go on amazon and order some blue light bulbs because they're cheaper, even though different brands are not making that claim, the first one tricked you into thinking it was true. You haven't entered into any contract with the manufacturer making that false claim, yet you are still harmed by it.

Right, but people (and companies) lie all the time, and it's not something that's illegal. It's amoral, but not illegal.

I'm not sure where I stand on the matter personally.

Like, taking the constant social turmoil in America as an example: anything people dislike they call disinformation/fake news, but are equally guilty and okay with of spreading and allowing the same behaviour if it furthers their agenda. Or they will at least be more lenient to their side of the arguments indulging in it, since it aligns with their biases.

I've seen this happen from both right wing and left wing members one Twitter and on Reddit. I personally don't use these platforms, but I've seen various threads with insane amounts of hypocrisy.

There's so many nuance and unresolved problems.

Like, how do we know truth isn't what's being censored?

How can we even tell in this day and age when the truth is? It's often diluted with some hidden agenda. Either political or corporate (or oftentimes both). I can't sit for hours fact checking everything I read from different sources. I have a job, and I also don't want to spend all my free time on it. But on the other hand it's also topic I care about (just not THAT much I guess?). Who to trust?

And I feel like this "the ones in power control what's true" generally feels like a slippery slope.

I also hate that I'm beginning to sound like a crazy tinfoil-wearing person.

Idk, humans are complicated. Social media in its current iteration was a mistake, since it created platforms for some very dangerous and narcissistic people

No, his scenario is not equivalent, but here's a few more:

"Hello, this is just a reminder that your voting station will be open between 5 pm and 9 pm in (somewhere where it's not actually located), please remember to vote!"

"Hello, if you would like a free ride to your voting station, please text us 'YES', and wait at (location) between X and Y pm (Nobody will show up)."

"Hello, we have a great offer for auto insurance, blah, blah, blah."

"Hello, just a reminder, millions of trustworthy people believe that <opposition candidate> was responsible for <something untrue and horrible>. This isn't slander, because we are just strongly implying it in this robocall. Also, they live at XY address, and won't someone rid is of this meddlesome priest?"

"Hello, all the doctors are lying to you, buy our snake oil wellness supplements, instead. They are supplements, not drugs, we don't answer to the FDA."

"Hello, let's go down to sixth and Broadway next Tuesday, and make some noise/put the fear of God into <group>"

"<Ethnic minority group> is burning this country's forests down using space lasers."

"Hello, please be aware that it's illegal to discuss your salary with your coworkers."

Just so I'm clear, is your argument that these statements should be censored?

Lots of these seem reprehensible, but totally within a reasonable space of legitimate free speech. Barring the cases with calls for imminent harm (e.g. turbulent priests and such), it seems that there's a big risk in trying to draw a legal line here.

In your polling station example, for instance, that has some clear negative impact. If I instead said "The library will be closed for the next month", is that protected though? What if I say "Arby's will be giving out free sandwiches from noon to two o'clock tomorrow"? All of these statements have negative impact.

The rationale for more extensive free speech is that it is expected that individuals have the right to hear what others are saying, and evaluating how bogus those are.

To be clear, some censorship is absolutely accepted in society today (e.g. libel laws, imminent threats, marketplace standards, etc), but the fear of an ill-defined line that can be shifted to suit political winds seems like a very reasonable one.

Except for the last, those are just lies that people in power find inconvenient. People were saying way more ridiculous things in the summer of 1787, and yet the country I live in enshrined free speech rights.

They also enshrined slavery, assuming you mean the US. Who cares what they enshrined? They have no credibility. If the merit of the argument holds no weight, then the fact that “the founding fathers” made it doesn’t make it more (or less) correct.

> Except for the last, those are just lies that people in power find inconvenient.

A few of them are plain-old voter suppression, and ~50% of the time, people in power find them incredibly convenient.

You don't see them very often, because in most free countries, trying any of them is an incredibly serious offence.

That depends entirely on who does it. An individual versus a government official.

The overarching point still stands. That people being in favor of censoring "disinformation" (ie speech by private individuals) in certain instances but not others is an inconsistent stance that carries a distinct appearance of partisanship.

“Hello, X is hosting strip shows with men dressed in women’s clothes and are grooming your children!”

Half of these scenarios are just variations of the comment I replied to. Again, there's a contract of sale. Your speech isn't being violated when you sign a contract promising you're selling what you claim to be selling.

As for the rest, you're free to make whatever lies you want about others. Free speech doesn't allow you to initiate force against others so I'm not particularly concerned with any of it. We have gun rights to deal with people that try to enter your house or attack you over your skin colour and space laser accusations.