Found out Finland bans all political advertising on TV and radio

I was chatting with a Finnish landscaper at a trade show in Chicago last month and he said they haven't had a political ad on broadcast since the 90s. Has anyone else run into countries that just cut off certain types of speech entirely like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

willow_ellis13d ago

Oh man, I gotta respectfully disagree with you here. I get why people think banning political ads sounds good in theory, but cutting off speech entirely feels like a slippery slope to me. In the US we already have way too many rules about what can and can't be said in media, and it usually ends up benefiting the people in power. Finland might work fine for them because their whole political culture is different, smaller country and all that. But I'd rather see us focus on making political ads more transparent and fact-checked than just pulling the plug on them completely.

reese8613d ago

You said "cutting off speech entirely feels like a slippery slope" and I think that's the exact thing we're seeing everywhere now, not just in politics. I notice it at my own HOA meetings where someone suggests we can't put up certain signs or flags and next thing you know nobody wants to speak up about anything because they're afraid of breaking some rule nobody even wrote down yet. Same thing happens at work with all these "safe space" policies that started out good but now people are scared to say basic stuff in team meetings. We keep trying to fix problems by shutting things down instead of dealing with the messiness of open conversation. I'd rather have a thousand bad ads I can ignore than one rule that accidentally stops me from hearing about a local issue that matters to me.