As an airport traveler, I'm glad they blocked the ads for the phrasing submitted, but I'm upset that they refused to explain their reasoning and negotiate better phrasing. For example:
"Know your digital rights at the border" is great. It's in the classic tone of raise-awareness campaigns, does not use fearmongering, and can be safely ignored by anyone who already understands them.
"Your phone isn't safe at the border" is not great. It makes you feel afraid, mis-describes the issue (what about laptops?), and doesn't specify the vested interest (it's about rights).
But you just answered the GP's concern, safe from what?
Also, just my phone? What about my laptop? Safe from searches? Pickpockets? Malware?
There's a big difference between raising awareness of issues(ex know your rights - check out xyz.com for more info) vs big brother is, watching; trust no one, followed by a border security queue
>Also, just my phone? What about my laptop? Safe from searches? Pickpockets? Malware?
If slogans had to be that comprehensive to be allowed, we would be blessedly free of advertising.
"Your phone isn't safe at the border" is on pretty much the same level as "for everything else there's mastercard" on the accuracy<->drama scale. I think your standards are beyond unreasonable here.
The assumption you leave unstated is that it is unsafe to have your phone searched by the government. While that's a point of view I consider true for many, and I endorse halting warrantless border searches of phones, it is certainly not true to say that phone searches are unsafe for all.
I know what you mean but I think the opposite: It IS unsafe to have warrantless government searches on your phone.
Once people get used to that what's next? Since we have your phone open, just go and pop your Gmail credentials in there for us why don't you? Your phone was in your pocket so what else do you have in there? Keys, what do they open? etc...
It's a slippery slope and the reason we have checks and balances.
I am guessing that a random person seeing that ad would be concerned about their phone getting physically damaged, not about their civil rights being violated.
> U.S. officials say it remains a minuscule percentage of overall travellers — 0.007 per cent, or roughly one per 13,000. The Department of Homeland Security says it's necessary to combat crimes like terrorism and child pornography.
I'm sick of hearing this argument. Either it's a small percentage of travellers or it's necessary to combat those crimes, but you cannot have both. The only way to have both of those is if you already have some probable cause or a reason to search particular individuals, in which case there's no need for it to be warrantless.
The ad phrasing isn't meant to do much more than give you a reason to go to the website, which answers your question and goes into far more detail. It's effective, and no different than any other advertising.
I am disappointed they blocked the ads, but the Streisand effect is in full force here.
> “In reviewing Open Media’s request to place advertising at the airport, we determined that it did not serve all of our stakeholders as we felt it pitted two groups against each other and it also has potential to add undue stress to the travel experience,” wrote spokesperson Brock Penner.
What should cause every single person passing through that airport stress is the idea that their fundamental assumptions about personal security are incorrect.
Good idea, bad approach. "Your phone isn't safe at the border" might be a hard fact but it's nonetheless an intentionally divisive expression of that sentiment. It's ambiguous, fearmongering.... facts can be clickbait, and this is one such case.
If the ads said "You can be legally compelled to X, even if Y. Learn more about your airport rights at www.url.com" then it would be much less objectionable IMO.
I don't get why campaigns keep making this mistake. Take the freaking high road. Imagine the mind of your opposition, and accomodate the low-hanging complaints they're going to have. Craft a message that's maximally agreeable to the people who disagree, while maintaining accuracy.
That's OpenMedia in a nutshell. They definitely aren't alone in this category, but I find them very frustrating. They mean well and I largely agree with them, but by agreeing with them I also seem to be agreeing with their nuance-free tabloid version of activism. I've somehow found myself on their mailing list a few times in the past and felt a strong sense of relief each time I have unsubscribed.
It's funny how advertising usually tries to sell people on things but a lot of "cause" related groups don't sell so much as try to preach to the choir or just fear monger in unproductive ways.
> a lot of "cause" related groups don't sell so much as try to preach to the choir
At many non-profits, the audiences for messaging are existing donors and fellow executives. There are no measurable objectives from the broader audience. Accountability is thus impossible.
>If the ads said "You can be legally compelled to X, even if Y. Learn more about your airport rights at www.url.com" then it would be much less objectionable IMO.
It's 'less objectionable' because it's bordering on bootlicking, and could even read as a tacit endorsement of the status quo.
Is that really bootlicking? I struggle to understand how that's the case, and I'd prefer to hear a dispassionate reading of reality that lets me decide how to feel based on my own values, rather than one that's intentionally extreme to try and scare me into subscribing to a position.
It is, in that police tactics can be aggressive, but being assertive about protecting yourself from aggressive police tactics is "radical" or "paranoid."
I wouldn't describe it as "unsafe". It's neither. Locks aren't dangerous. There is a whole level of subtext going on there and if you are in on it (which you seem to be), then it makes complete sense. If you are not, it leaves you scratching your head (as I was). I will argue that it is completely ineffective wording as the only people who will understand what it means are the people who don't need to read it.
Because it works. And because many other campaigns do it and nobody cares. Then in one random occasion suddenly it's a big drama. Who could have known before? Marketing agencies have been inventing divisive ad statements for ages.
> They said we didn’t fit into the criteria but weren’t able to tell us at that point what were the criteria
This kind of thing is problematic when someone has a monopoly, which governments and major airports do by default. It might be reasonable under some conditions to have criteria for rejecting ads that are too political, controversial, unfair to the airlines, etc... but those criteria should be published.
> “In reviewing Open Media’s request to place advertising at the airport, we determined that it did not serve all of our stakeholders as we felt it pitted two groups against each other and it also has potential to add undue stress to the travel experience,” wrote spokesperson Brock Penner.
I now have undue stress because of you Brock Penner and your stakeholders.
Who are these two groups? Your customers and an oppressive regime?
That's a dishonest quote, you didn't include the context that was provided on why YVR considers it political.
> Additionally, YVR aims to be non-political and Open Media’s borderprivacy.ca website promotes an online petition with a political call-to-action directed towards government officials.
Not that I agree with YVRs decision not to allow the ad, but I find it hard to argue that a website including a petition and urging visitors to message the government about the issue to be "non-political."
Your point is technically correct (the best kind of correct), but consider that in the US, the IRS's rules for 501(c)3 organizations, for example, allow those organizations to advocate for political policies without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status, but not for or against candidates.
There is a legitimate argument to be made that policy advocacy is a different kind of "political" than what people generally take that term to mean.
EDIT: That said, I agree with the many other comments here that the tone of the ad in question was confrontational, counter-productive, and fear-mongering. They could perfectly well have made their — again, technically correct — point with a more constructive or informative tone.
I can personally be political but still inform people of their rights without being so. Now, if I asked for more rights that is probably a political statement.
> Now, if I asked for more rights that is probably a political statement.
That's literally what the ad in question is accused of doing. The link leads to a petition to ask the government for _more_ rights in regards to protection of privacy at the border.
If you read a bit further down, there was a political aspect to the advertisement:
> “Additionally, YVR aims to be non-political and Open Media’s borderprivacy.ca website promotes an online petition with a political call-to-action directed towards government officials.”
Advertises and marketers mislead and exaggerate with near impunity and use legalistic language drafted by lawyers to cover their asses. It is standard practice for companies to knowingly deploy psychological trickery in order to manipulate consumers, including very young children. This is accepted because capitalism is the one cow that can not be slaughtered. Profit is always good. Caveat emptor.
But a civil liberties group informing citizens of their rights in an attention catching way is deplored as intrusive and inappropriate and not “objective” enough.
This attitude speaks volumes about a society that has lost its way and is slowly collapsing under the irreconcilable contradictions it refuses to honestly address.
I encourage people to read this article as it more or less gives each side their "best shot" by fully quoting the airport's position, in their own words. I'm sure the side blocking the ads would prefer that the headline redd "rejects" or "chooses not to run" (rather than blocks), but in the body of the article they have a chance to state their piece in full. I'll quote this part (in the article this is followed by a direct quoted rebuttal literally starting with the words "This is wrong"):
>“In reviewing Open Media’s request to place advertising at the airport, we determined that it did not serve all of our stakeholders as we felt it pitted two groups against each other and it also has potential to add undue stress to the travel experience,” wrote spokesperson Brock Penner.
>“Additionally, YVR aims to be non-political and Open Media’s borderprivacy.ca website promotes an online petition with a political call-to-action directed towards government officials.”
(It should go without saying that I am not endorsing this statement.)
A recent student software engineering competition competition in Canada gave first prize to a team that used cell phone signals and embedded devices around an area to locate a person and track their movements. It was a sponsored project, the idea being to use it in airports. The sponsor was very happy.
Yet another example of the failure of the narrow view that free speech only concerns government. A view that is disturbingly popular (see https://xkcd.com/1357/) despite an ever larger portion of public speech being conducted through corporate platforms.
You skipped a step, jumping straight to a possible solution. But that may not be the only solution, and even if it were, it shouldn't prevent us from acknowledging the problem.
And it gets blurry when the private parties are ISPs or phone companies.
Edit: Alright, taking the hypothetical that the solution is compelled speech, I'll try to explain how it's less bad. First is that there's a distinction between original speech and conveying the speech of others. E.g. it would be pretty awful if ISPs or phone companies started interfering with what they'll transfer through their networks. I frankly disagree with calling what a telecommunications provider does 'speech' - they're paid to move bits, like a moving service is paid to move furniture. And second, if you don't look at it through such an abstract "free speech vs. compelled speech" lens, but through a pragmatic "who can speak and what can they say" one, you'll see that almost no-one has effective free speech. Online, almost all of the audience is on (a small handful of) private platforms, carried by private ISPs, hosted on private servers. Offline, people spend much of their time in privately-owned spaces, such as airports. If you cut all those away, how much speech does the great 1st Amendment buy you? You can yell on a street corner (not Wall street though - those streets are private!), or in the woods, and send a few paper letters through the government-ran post office. You'll reach maybe a handful of people. Meanwhile speech blessed by the platform owners will reach millions. Difference from complete censorship is negligible. That's why you shouldn't legislate in a vacuum divorced from reality, where only platonic ideals of free or compelled speech exist. You'll choose an ideal free speech law, and the effect will be that a handful of corporations will get to decide what can be said.
The First Amendment doesn't guarantee you an audience. It only guarantees you that the State can't constrain your speech without a damned good reason. It is utterly orthogonal to conduct between private parties, and it's specious as hell to bring it up in that context.
For example, even in the case where it effectively limits your ability to sue people for speech you don't like, the actual constraint is on the ability of the State, in the form of the court system, to be leveraged against an individual's speech, not on your ability to sue.
I know very well the 1st Amendment applies only to the State - my whole series of posts is about the problems that arise due to that. Free speech as a concept is not limited to the 1st Amendment.
Your right to make noise with your pie hole in no way obligates anyone else to listen to, or even hear you, let alone broadcast that noise to a larger audience than you would have had without their help. Full stop.
There is absolutely a legitimate, and very, very important conversation to be had around whether, e.g., online censorship or moderation or "deplatforming", or whatever, might constitute something functionally akin to prior restraint, where the edge cases are in those questions, and what to do about all that.
That said, having those discussions about private behavior using terms that are — and historically have more or less always been — used in the specific context of the State only confuses things.
My point being: if we're going to have that discussion, which we for reals should be doing, let's try to do it in a way that doesn't make it harder to have, let alone have productively.
The attempt to expand the specifically and narrowly constrained notion of "Free Speech" (note the capitalization) to domains other than a constraint upon the State is a specious conflation, and ultimately yields more heat than light.
EDIT: I mean, really, how productively can that conversation be had if it's using terminology that enables randos who don't meaningfully understand this distinction to pile on, all, "But the Twitters violated my 1st Amendmentses!"?
> And it gets blurry when the private parties are ISPs or phone companies.
Not really. That's pretty much exactly what the changes to the verbiage in Title II of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the FCC's 2015 classification of ISPs as Common Carriers were for.
It is up to you, you being part of the society and possibly the electorate. "Marriage is between a man and a woman" was a settled matter and so was "Separate but equal" and "three fifth" before that. Until it wasn't.
I think you're reading my position rather uncharitably, and genuinely don't enjoy being likened to a bigot. I absolutely disagree with the notion that the social fictions we call "corporations" are people, but I'm talking within the established legal framework, because that's the context.
If you want to have a discussion about how shit should be done, I'm happy to; I'd just have appreciated being told that's the one we were having before being called out or dinged for wrongthink, thanks...
Just to clarify, I didn't accuse you of wrongthink or tried to frame you as supporting the "personhood" of corporations. I just think you're wrong about it "not being up to you" and it being a "settled matter".
This seems like it ignores "despite an ever larger portion of public speech being conducted through corporate platforms."
Compelled speech is (rightly) illegal in pretty much all cases, and while "both or neither" is not quite the same as directly compelling a specific statement, it's still not a free-speech-respecting stance. The thorny question is how to handle public speech conducted through private platforms - for instance the suit over whether President Trump can block people on Twitter. Twitter is obviously a private platform, but it's being used by a public figure to make policy announcements, and blocking restricts the ability of certain people to see and respond to those announcements.
"Public forum" doctrine is controversial, but it's far from new. More broadly, it's the First Amendment application of a larger question: how far can the government go in using private intermediaries to bypass constitutional protections? On the Fourth, police are allowed to use private tips with origins that would be "unreasonable search", but can't proactively request or pay for such searches. On the Fifth, a non-government party might prompt admissible hearsay by means not available to the police, but that doesn't free the police to hand off interrogations to private parties.
That sort of constitutionality-laundering is an increasingly pressing issue, everywhere from warrantless lookups of mobile phone locations to public speech conducted on Twitter. And this is quite clearly the claim laid out in the article (though it's not a US case): that airports are so closely linked to the government that their ability to control speech (especially speech related to government behavior in airports) is restricted. It's a matter open to dispute, but it's very much not as simple as compelling speech from a private party.
I think it's, for example, eminently possible to reconcile Twitter's right not to be obligated to carry "hate speech" (aside: please don't derail this discussion with an unnecessary diversion into whether that's a thing, or where its boundaries are; this is meta-level) with the President's not being able to block people.
If he's using the platform to conduct "official" business (which, IMO, he is), blocking is pretty obviously not kosher. That's an utterly different case than whether they should have to promulgate Joe Bigot's shitty opinions. We already have structurally similar legal doctrines in place in the case of libel against public figures, for example.
Looking for blanket solutions is the wrong idea, out the gate, however much more difficult and nuanced that will ultimately make handling the thorniness of the issue, taken large, and I think you actually already appreciate that, with your takes on the 4th and 5th Amendment questions.
Twitter is very much not obligated to pass along any random person's terrible views (and thanks for the disclaimer; no interest in seeing that argument again). If Trump decides to conduct official business there, they aren't quite facing compelled speech because they can (in theory) ban him; the outcome we'd hopefully get is that his official speech is restricted, but Twitter is free to host him or not.
I suppose at this point the only question is whether a government-proxy rationale applies to airports in this specific case, since I definitely agree that Kayak or Travelocity couldn't be required to accept these ads on their site.
At best, useless. At worst, detrimental to the experience. It's a good way to drive me away from your site. I can't think of anything I hate more (in design terms) than the current trend of auto-playing videos following you down the page.
“In reviewing Open Media’s request to place advertising at the airport, we determined that it did not serve all of our stakeholders as we felt it pitted two groups against each other and it also has potential to add undue stress to the travel experience,” wrote spokesperson Brock Penner.
Just so much wrong in this quote, three questions for Brock:
Which stakeholders aren't being served?
What two groups are being pitted against each other?
Is stress that results from knowing the extent of your rights 'undue'?
I'll assume the two stakeholder groups referred to are travellers and CBSA.
I believe they should let the advocacy and informative message run.
The message is sensational, but no more so than any other ad with an agenda (i.e. all of them) and many travellers through YVR (Canadian or otherwise) would benefit from considering what they may be compelled to share, without warrant or regular safeguards, with CBSA.
And if CBSA wants to run a sensational, informative, and fear-based campaign of their own, let them. (As if they already aren't.)
When at airports, I want to see kinda harmless ads: beautiful homes, greenery, that sort of thing. I'm fine with this. Traveling is stressful enough as it is.
If this were a frequent event it'd be fine, but it's a rare event, so I'd rather be chill. Like having a big ad saying "Your plane could crash" before the gate. No thanks. Not worth it.
"Know your digital rights at the border" is great. It's in the classic tone of raise-awareness campaigns, does not use fearmongering, and can be safely ignored by anyone who already understands them.
"Your phone isn't safe at the border" is not great. It makes you feel afraid, mis-describes the issue (what about laptops?), and doesn't specify the vested interest (it's about rights).
Both parties deserve censure for their choices.