It was Clearcast that rejected it you can see the reasoning here [0], seems to be mostly that it implies VPNs facilitate criminal activity and "irrelevant to the average consumer’s experience with a VPN". Either way they gave a real gift to the marketing team in rejecting it. Every person in advertising dreams of having to write the phrase "our banned ad" even more perfect when the ad was about tracking/censorship.
you can see what mullvad, the company selling a product here, say what the reasoning was.
As i say, smacks of marketing campaign. Did clearcast give the marketing team a gift, or did the marketing team invent it? All we have is Mullvads word, but my word they have been running an extensive campaign in london for a while now.
Step 1:
cryptically warn people that their rights are under attack.
Step 2:
tell people that you have been banned from saying any more.
Step 3:
Conveniently make no mention of the fact that this highly controversial 'banned' ad is absolutely watchable, in the UK, on youtube, with links to it from traditional media adverts.
> Step 2: tell people that you have been banned from saying any more.
They said their ad is "banned from TV" because they offer a way to circumvent internet surveillance.
> Step 3: Conveniently make no mention of the fact that this highly controversial 'banned' ad is absolutely watchable, in the UK, on youtube, with links to it from traditional media adverts.
Because it is about TV... what does YouTube have to do with this? It says on the damn Ad "Banned on TV".
The point I was replying to used the existence of a Wikipedia article as proof that there is a problem in the UK regarding surveillance. By providing an example of similar articles about other locations I was showing that this alone is not particularly strong evidence. It certainly wasn't whataboutism, I don't even think the user I was replying to is from the US.
If only one country has an article about something you'd probably think it's an outlier. If every country has the article then you'd more likely think it's just part of life. I didn't make an assertion, I'm not providing evidence.
I don't even disagree with the post, I just don't like seeing shallow dismissals where someone could've actually put effort in to make a point. So I did the same.
Hah, yes I switched over as soon as they started showing the scenes behind the scenes behind the scenes.
I worked on the set of an electric shaver commercial once. I’m wouldn’t say out loud that the production team were up themselves, but in addition to the regular crew there was a second director on set making a “making of” documentary about the production process. For a shaver commercial.
Mullvad says it is, they're more credible than Ofcom or Ofcom's fans. The trick of strong-arming all providers of a certain medium to "self"-censor in order to implement advance censorship is an old trick.
You avoid having companies, who can swallow the bill, making whatever claims they like without having to much to worry about other than a slap on the wrist - Their claims are already out. J&J, P&G, Unilever et al - you may trust them to do the right thing, i don't.
Conflating 'Advertising' with 'Speech' doesn't really work here i feel.
It is possible to restrict one without the other. The UK, can quite easily stop an advert from saying things like:
>> A paid-for Meta ad and a website listing for an online clothing company misleadingly claimed they were established and owned by armed forces veterans and that they donated a share of profits to PTSD support organisations.
And still allow The Guardian to run a campaign on shadowy organisations funding politics.
Conflating them is done, i feel by those who run companies... i dunno, like VPN's, for the purposes of viral marketing and generating outrage.
That's the thing: the idea that one must be allowed. No; you publish it, and the most the government can do is stop you from repeating it and punish you for having done so.
Note that I'm not defending the US system as perfect, or even necessarily good in all places and at all times. But it is a system that has benefits.
There are quite a few countries which consistently score higher than the US on democracy, overall freedom and press freedom indices, despite not having these absolutist freedom of speech provisions in their constitutions (if they even have constitutions). Because it's not about the piece of paper or what's written on it, is it? It's about the society and what it allows their government to get away with. If the US ever becomes an authoritarian dictatorship, it'll have the exact same constitution and reverence for Founding Fathers, plus a few extra Supreme Court decisions.
Like the RSF press freedom index, which ranks multiple countries in the top 10, where you can be jailed for expressing your earnest belief that something didn't happen?
I'm German. Punishing people for holocaust denial is exactly the right thing to do. There is no reason to deny that the holocaust has happened, because it has happened.
We don't see this as censorship, it's a safeguard against an ideology that destroyed democracy.
What about in the cases of satire? I make a joke about the holocaust not happening in a comedy club in Berlin, is that illegal? I think with it being such a slippery slope is why Americans take the stance they do.
It's not a slippery slope. It's a narrowly defined offense tied to a specific historical crime: the state-organized genocide carried out by Nazi Germany. It's a response to a specific historical responsibility.
The decisive factor is whether the joke attacks the ideology or reinforces it. So if a comedian in Berlin says "the Holocaust didn’t happen" as a punchline, and it comes across as actual denial or trivialization, that can be illegal.
Broadcasters themselves aren't subject to pre-clearance; obviously, live TV exists.
> the most the government can do is stop you from repeating it and punish you for having done so.
Yes - and, because of this, Clearcast exists with a sort of "TSA pre-clear" role. If Clearcast pass it, it's very unlikely to result in subsequent legal action.
TV stations are in principle free to broadcast unrestricted ads live and deal with the consequences. Obviously, they have no interest in doing that.
> No; you publish it, and the most the government can do is stop you from repeating it and punish you for having done so.
Soooo.... if I approach a US tv network with an ad that explicitly shows naked people doing cocaine, and carries the message that drugs are amazing, and ask for it to be scheduled during the kids tv peak slot, the networks are going to say "Hey, cool, yeah we'll do that"?
This seems very unlikely to me. It seems much more likely their internal compliance departments will look at it and say "Nope". So much for "you publish it".
Because that's basically what's happened here - the UK networks have outsourced checks on advertising to a third party they own, which itself gets its advertising code of conduct from an industry association the networks are part of. The third party makes decisions about whether an ad is OK. If it's not OK then the networks won't usually want to air it.
“You publish it” means you - not someone else. You can write your cocaine-is-great pamphlet and give it out. That’s it. Nobody has to agree to let you share your message on their platform.
But that is still missing the point. I said that the US way isn’t all downsides. Curiosly enough, I haven’t seen a reply (but I might miss some downstream) that acknowledges this. I’m not a moron. The US way isn’t the most perfect bestest ever with no faults. If you want to argue that there is nothing redeeming about the First Amendment, then do so. But unless you are prepared to do that, don’t act like it has no benefits.
Advertising is clearly speech. But fraud and libel are widely recognized as exceptions to free speech, IF you can prove intent to defraud. If you squint, you could classify nearly anything as an advertisement, but not everything is classifiable as "true" or not in an objective, universal sense (or even a generally recognized sense). For example, an ad for a church may be an expression of free speech, but arguing that it is false advertisement is absurd.
The solution for that is to commit a Pentagon Papers worth of atrocities every single day, so that people get worn out from reading about it and just come to expect it as normal.
"Calibri does convey a sense of casualness — and more so, modernity — that is not appropriate for the U.S. State Department. And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities. People with actual accessibility needs should be catered to, but they need more than a sans serif typeface, and their needs should not primarily motivate the choice for the default typeface."
Official departmental paperwork shouldn't look clownish.
The same John Gruber that, quote tweeting a news article about Israel closing off phone and internet services to Gazans, wrote "Fuck around and find out"
> And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities
Oh well that settles it, John Gruber doesn’t buy the argument. Wrap it up and let’s head home, folks, this one’s settled, no need to refer to any actual research or evidence.
I hadn't planned on spending my evening googling the pay grade of government officials, calculating the time taken to change a font on Microsoft Word and extrapolating that over a year.
If you had read the article, you would know the answer to this question.
Calibri is a font designed to be easier to read on screens, which is where documents are primarily read in 2025. Switching to using Calibri as the default was a meaningful change that provided improved accessibility at literally no cost to anyone.
Switching back to Times New Roman, a serif font that is provably more difficult to read on screens is yet another act of performative cruelty by this administration who seemingly operates with "the cruelty is the point" as one of its core tenets.
You made a low effort post, and I pointed out how if you had put in the effort to read the article prior to commenting you would have gotten the answer to your question.
Would you like me to be more patronizing to you and say, "The article clearly states which of the font changes was the performative one and which was meaningful."?
But sure, buddy, run off to hide behind a site rule the moment you get called out for a low effort post you made that is breaking at least two rules itself:
- Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
- Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Is screen readability the only value to consider?
Whether it is "the only value to consider" or not is beside the point, and you know it. The Trump Administration's only value they considered is "Biden did it, so we're going to undo it." They considered nothing else. You know. I know it. Everyone knows it. Why do we know it? Because they have made it abundantly clear that they have no idea what "DEI" actually is, so they just slap that label on anything the previous administration did, put out an order rolling it back, and use it as a wedge issue.
If he was actually worried about whether a san-serif typeface was worse for printed documents, he could have simply ordered that all printed documents must use TNR or any of the other better options that exist. But he isn't. He's simply concerned with killing "DEI," where "DEI" just means whatever they decide it means today.
Because Calibri is an easier to read font on screens, which is where a lot more reading is being done.
Since it was done as an accessibility measure, it is seen as something for "inclusion" which is part of the scary "DEI" (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). So it had to go, because forbid we do something that makes things slightly easier for people.
Let's even say (incorrectly, probably) that the switch to Calibri was "performative" or "virtue signaling". That's, in my opinion, significantly less terrible than performative cruelty or anti-virtue signaling.
Not really, we just say the parents are more attuned to their child then the national government. I love the dystopian argument that without age laws parents would be out buying cigarettes and booze.
Narrators voice: there was, in fact, issues with safety culture at nasa between Kennedy's speech and the moon landing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
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