At 2'58'' you can see a frame of them projecting on Senate House, London.
During WW2 that was used by the Ministry of Information, and it inspired Orwell's description for the building of the Ministry of Truth. His wife His Eileen worked in the building for the Censorship Department.
> Mullvad was rejected by Clearcast, the organization responsible for approving all TV ads in the UK and ensuring they comply with the rules set by the authorities
> “The overall concept lacks clarity.”
“It is unclear why certain examples are included, who the ‘speaker’ represents, and the role of individuals depicted in the car.”
> "Referencing topics such as: Paedophiles, Rapists, Murderers, Enemies of the state, Journalists, Refugees, Controversial opinions, People’s bedrooms, Police officers, Children’s headsets … is inappropriate and irrelevant to the average consumer’s experience with a VPN."
Maybe it's just from an American perspective, but this is absolutely wild to me. Even just the concept of a government-mandated pre-approval body for advertisement seems like a completely pants-on-head concept [1].
I think the American First Amendment would obliterate this government body and probably the whole institution if it was ever tried.
[1] Yes the FCC has limited authority after-the-fact to impose fines for things like indecency.
This isn't a government body. It's owned by the TV networks, and makes it easier for companies to get ads pre-apporoved without needing to submit them individually to each network.
Do US TV networks have any rules about what can be shown in ads? Because I somewhat doubt that a company could submit whatever they want and the network has to air it.
In Germany, ads are not subject to prior government approval, as that would violate the constitution's prohibition of prior restraint. However, advertising is heavily regulated, especially in areas like medicine, gambling, and tobacco.
There is also industry self-regulation through bodies like the German Advertising Standards Council, which reviews complaints and can issue public reprimands.
So the system is not "you must get permission before speaking," but rather "you are free to publish, but you are accountable if you violate clear legal standards."
I’m also skeptical of pre-approval mechanisms in principle. I think the German mechanism works really well.
Well, then, you'd better make sure that's what your bureaucrats are actually keeping off the air.
I'm sure the process allows for any citizen to review all of the rejected material in full, right? And you've done your part to do that, right? You take responsibility for the restrictions you want, right?
Why would I do that? I run an adblocker, I don't want to watch any adverts at all.
(there are perhaps valid questions about UK broadcasting restrictions, but since the internet this has become much, much less important. All the really absurd stuff like Gerry Adams lies in the 20th century)
Advance censorship is typically forbidden, for good reason. It's one thing to go after someone for lying, another thing to sit there all the time and try to make sure no lies are ever heard.
>My British perspective: I don’t want advertisers free to lie as much as they want.
Not exactly what happened here is it?
A private company which somehow gets to approve ads rejected an advert complaining about a dystopian lack of privacy under a government that is actively trying to kill off privacy.
The private company "somehow" gets to approve ads because it's owned by the TV networks that air the ads. Better than needing separate approval from each network.
Censorship is not a solution. Instead, companies, whose messages are misleading, could pay a fine for their misleading message. Otherwise, you end up in 1984...sorry, I mistyped "UK in 2026".
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.
A fine doesn’t undo a lie that’s already made it around the world.
Although given Brexit I’d question how useful the ASA actually is. It seems Russian funded politicians were free to spew endless lies at the average citizen with no repercussions.
Do broadcast standards and practices for TV networks in the USA not extend to advertising?
It would be very strange for them to e.g censor certain kinds of drug references in the programmes they produce and air, but then permit them in adverts, no?
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.
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.
The down votes really reflect the groupthink here. American implementation of 1A is not perfect - tyrants still get around to suppressing speech they dislike.
On the contrary, the recent developments of America have made it very clear what the problem with "freedom to lie" and "freedom to smear" is. Especially when we're talking about adverts, which aren't exactly an important part of the discourse universe and are a potential vector for fraud.
(wait until the Americans understand what the rules for political TV broadcasts are in the UK, they will absolutely lose their minds. And the spending rules. And how little money is involved in UK elections.)
There's more serious concerns about UK libel law, and things like the proscription of Palestine Action, but generally I would say that if what you have to say is both true and important you can get your message across. Despite the newspapers and broadcasters.
If you've seen analytics from stuff hitting the front page here in the last few years you'd see why, by which I mean the US tech industry is much less of the audience on here than you might think.
Now that we've all gone through a Discord allergy phase I wonder where all that has really landed.
The downvotes might also represent people downvoting those who are uninformed - Clearcast is a private body owned and operated by the broadcasters, not a government body.
It's not government mandated. It's a defacto requirement as all commercial broadcasters require it but that their commercial choice not government.
What's actually illegal in law to broadcast is very different from what you practically cant due to the theoretically voluntary codes. Even that guidance is broad but hard to argue with "Advertisements must contain nothing that could cause physical, mental, moral or social harm to persons under the age of 18." No reasonable person would argue you should be allowed to do that.
The US has other active vectors with similar objectives of expanding government mandated controls over online activity - see the discussion on California age verification law https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181208. So maybe I'm seeing things in my pattern matching - but it seems like a broad push to attack online freedoms into centrist left and right legislatures coming from some internationally coordinated effort.
Imagine a world where the “AI” peddlers would be forced to make realistic claims about their “product” instead of the American advertising style lies were being spammed with everywhere…
>I think the American First Amendment would obliterate this government body and probably the whole institution if it was ever tried.
I think this is exactly the kind of thing Trump is trying to slow walk us into while everyone is distracted by his war in Iran.
First consolidate the networks into the hands of a few loyal supporters (you don’t need a body to ban a commercial The networks refuse to air), then use the FCC to clean up the remaining opposition.
They're a private company functioning as industry self-regulation, not a government department.
Broadcasters sign up to the code, Clearcast pre-clears ads against the code.
Ofcom is the regulator in this space, Clearcast appears to be an industry effort to pre-empt Ofcom by making sure things comply before they've gone out. Broadcasters want Clearcast's seal of approval before broadcast so they know they're OK to broadcast it.
Entirely private sector, I'm not sure there's a lot that's wild about it.
If you're expecting me to say that the Trump administration isn't literally fascist, openly evil, and aggressively anti-free-speech, or that plenty of previous administrations in the US haven't done indefensible things (even while being qualitatively better than Trump II), you may have to wait a very long time...
I guess it depends on how you perceive "censorship". I wouldn't think of banning a misleading ad as censorship. My country, Greece, was under a military dictatorship for a few years in the 1960's and 70's, and censorship involved e.g. pre-approving all music, including not just song lyrics but also the music scores. Works by the two major Greek composers, Theodorakis and Hatzidakis [1] were banned outright and could not be played anywhere under pain of pain [2]. Obviously everything anyone wanted to publish in the press had to be pre-approved by state censors and any criticism of the regime, either written or simply spoken out loud, was punishable... you get the gist.
Not allowing advertisers to lie to advertise their product is I think not a kind of "censorship" one really needs to be worried about. They're free to advertise their product otherwise, they're just not free to lie to do it.
I feel silly making this elementary point, but freedoms can't ever be absolute in a society of more than one humans. Even in the US I bet you're free to drive, but you're not free to drive drunk. You're free to have sexual relations, but not with a minor. You're free to walk anywhere you like but not in other peoples' property and not on the streets with the cars (which btw is perfectly fine in Europe and it's rules about jaywalking that are "pants on head" for us).
These are rules. Societies have rules. They should have them. There's no problem with that.
And now my 16-year old self is very disappointed that I've grown up to be a conservative, establishmentarian fossil.
___________
[1] Coincidence. We're not all called something-akis.
Clearcast is a private body owned by the broadcasters. The BCAP code is issued by the Advertising Standards Authority which, despite the name, is an industry self-regulation body.
It appears to be established in law that Clearcast is an assistance service, and approval doesn't seem to be sufficient or necessary by law to ensure advertising is legal. It establishes risk, rather than making a legal finding.
If Mullvad's ad was 'banned' by Clearcast, what happened is that their ad didn't meet the standards that the industry has set for itself and the broadcasters didn't want to touch it.
(edit - does this make it 'better'? I don't know. It seems to me a bit like the situation in the US with HOAs, which heavily restrict what you can and can't do with your property, but aren't exactly government either. But I favour accuracy over emotion when talking about this stuff, which is why I wanted to point out the actual structure of the system here.)
Not sure how an HOA is relevant here? Communities vote to form an HOA for themselves, new owners buying into an HOA community know up-front what the restrictions are.
Not remotely the same as a cabal of media conglomerates getting together to agree on their own rules about how they are going to interpret and enforce government-mandated censorship in society.
It's relevant because everyone is saying this is government censorship. The parent is pointing out it's the government in the same way as a HOA is. Ie not.
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.
Free speech does not exist in the UK or EU. At most there are vague free opinion laws with many grey areas that boil down to "keep them to yourself" if you like to keep your door hinged.
I'm sorry to say but that's ignorant bullshit. Freedom, not only of speech, but of expression and information, is enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the major legal document of the EU; whence I quote:
Article 11 - Freedom of expression and information
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
2. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.
The link above clarifies that this article corresponds to article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (a legal document of the Council of Europe, a different body than the EU, whose members are a strict subset of the members of the CoE). Article 10 delimits restrictions to the right of expression, as follows:
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
And as the article points out, those restrictions apply to article 11 freedoms also, acting as an upper bound:
Pursuant to Article 52(3) of the Charter, the meaning and scope of this right are the same as those guaranteed by the ECHR. The limitations which may be imposed on it may therefore not exceed those provided for in Article 10(2) of the Convention, without prejudice to any restrictions which Community competition law may impose on Member States' right to introduce the licensing arrangements referred to in the third sentence of Article 10(1) of the ECHR.
In other words, yes, there is freedom of "speech", a.k.a expression, in the EU and it, and its limits, are enshrined in law.
I hate to make assumptions but there are a few public figures from the US that have argued that "Europe" has no freedom of speech like the brave US, like Paul Graham and Elon Musk, but they're talking out of their backsides.
Read up on the rules surrounding tobacco and alcohol advertising in the US. Make sure you're sitting down, because I fear this may come as a huge shock to you.
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".
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.
Sadly, it's Mullvad VPN itself which may be banned in the UK. VPNs will require identify verification. Not a problem for companies which require credit cards for payment, but Mullvad famously allows anonymous cash payments through the post.
Mass surveillance and living in a police state is an ingrained part of British culture.
It is no wonder to me that police procedurals are the most popular genre of TV shows in UK by quite a margin. They really are high-quality, but it does really feel like thinly-veiled propaganda (often commissioned by the BBC) portraying the State and police as the good guys in their endless quest against the baddies. Thank god there are CCTVs at every corner keeping the peace!
Weird extrapolation. They're popular in lots of places - Law & Order has been running 30 years.
None of this is unique to the UK. Never seen 24? The entire theme of that show was that torture is fine, actually, and coincidentally on TV at the time people were being renditioned by the CIA.
I'd be more surprised if there was a country where this kind of thing didn't happen.
Honestly both Labour and Conservatives are bound to take a beating next elections. I have no idea how will Greens and/or Reform government look like, we shall see.
FYI link is below, for the off-chance someone is curious.
(not sure what are the unwritten rules of self-promotion here, but hopefully providing a link in a sub-comment instead of the comment itself makes it okay-ish?)
Personally I find the advert a bit confusing, even with an understanding of what they are trying to achieve and their business. Was expecting something along the lines of Led By Donkeys...
I can't use Mullvad for several banks in the UK with IPv4 - if I switch to IPv6 in the app settings I sometimes can, but often I have to just disable it completely...
I can't use Youtube anonymously (i.e. without logging in) within the last month or so either, as Youtube very often won't play content due to my IP as well...
I saw the ads on the tube and was very confused. I knew about Mullvad, but it never crossed my mind they were trying to get me to search for "and then".
I saw the ads saying "and then?" and still didnt get it.
I like the product but i think their ad campaigns suck. If they want exposure and controversy i think they should run adverts to kill new proposed laws, target privacy hating politicians, etc.
Maybe it's just me, but there's something extra dystopian about surveillance and privacy invasion, when presented with the London skyline in the background.
What I have wanted for a very long time for America:
1. The government cannot ban any speech in advance of publication (eg verbally making the statement; or airing; or publishing etc).
2. If proven in Court that the statement maker: (a) knew the statement was false; (b) made the statement for the purpose of influencing public opinion regarding a law or government policy or election; or for the purpose of marketing a product for sale to the public; then the penalty upon conviction is...:
here is the secret sauce: super severe penalty such as: imprisonment without chance of parole or pardon for 10 years unless you are an elected official or candidate for office, in which event life in prison; or loss of 50% of your assets; or something similar
In other words, keep freedom of speech but if you are intentionally lying to the public for the purpose of impacting government affairs or the sale of a product - then you are going to suffer an incredibly punitive penalty.
The whole ad is vague slop tbh, I can see why it wasn't allowed to air, also I don't know why people fixate on CCTV when the vast majority of it is used by private companies and the government doesn't have access to it without a request, there isn't any mass surveillance in this case just business owners managing risk and monitoring for crimes on their property
Place a giant video ad in tourist places in London to sell adblock?
And how much "surveillance" does a VPN prevent anyway? This is a regulatory & legislative problem and I don't see how any public VPN is part of the solution.
> And how much "surveillance" does a VPN prevent anyway?
Changing your acc number every other month and paying anonymously is much easier on Mullvad than on the ISP level. You can also get multiple people on the number very easily. And Mullvad is likely an entity outside of your home country, hence more difficult to coerce than your ISP.
In my eyes ISPs are compromised by default so the aim is to guard against them, if Mullvad is also as compromised it's more difficult for them to track me across account numbers and, even if they do, my data is then in another country, which worries me less than it being local since I'm not important enough to warrant international action.
> And Mullvad is likely an entity outside of your home country, hence more difficult to coerce than your ISP
This is not true in the EU or for the signatories of the Lugano Convention (the EU, Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway). Mullvad is very explicit that they'll abide by all EU laws. For instance, see the e-Evidence Regulation specifically written for "network-based services" like "proxy services": https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
During WW2 that was used by the Ministry of Information, and it inspired Orwell's description for the building of the Ministry of Truth. His wife His Eileen worked in the building for the Censorship Department.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_House,_London
> “The overall concept lacks clarity.” “It is unclear why certain examples are included, who the ‘speaker’ represents, and the role of individuals depicted in the car.”
> "Referencing topics such as: Paedophiles, Rapists, Murderers, Enemies of the state, Journalists, Refugees, Controversial opinions, People’s bedrooms, Police officers, Children’s headsets … is inappropriate and irrelevant to the average consumer’s experience with a VPN."
Maybe it's just from an American perspective, but this is absolutely wild to me. Even just the concept of a government-mandated pre-approval body for advertisement seems like a completely pants-on-head concept [1].
I think the American First Amendment would obliterate this government body and probably the whole institution if it was ever tried.
[1] Yes the FCC has limited authority after-the-fact to impose fines for things like indecency.
Do US TV networks have any rules about what can be shown in ads? Because I somewhat doubt that a company could submit whatever they want and the network has to air it.
I’ve had ads taken off the TV for being clearly misleading (anyone can raise a complaint to the ASA - the Advertising Standards Agency).
There is also industry self-regulation through bodies like the German Advertising Standards Council, which reviews complaints and can issue public reprimands.
So the system is not "you must get permission before speaking," but rather "you are free to publish, but you are accountable if you violate clear legal standards."
I’m also skeptical of pre-approval mechanisms in principle. I think the German mechanism works really well.
I'm sure the process allows for any citizen to review all of the rejected material in full, right? And you've done your part to do that, right? You take responsibility for the restrictions you want, right?
(there are perhaps valid questions about UK broadcasting restrictions, but since the internet this has become much, much less important. All the really absurd stuff like Gerry Adams lies in the 20th century)
Instead, fight misinformation with superior information.
I think we have a ministry for that.
Not exactly what happened here is it?
A private company which somehow gets to approve ads rejected an advert complaining about a dystopian lack of privacy under a government that is actively trying to kill off privacy.
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.
Although given Brexit I’d question how useful the ASA actually is. It seems Russian funded politicians were free to spew endless lies at the average citizen with no repercussions.
Free speech isn't about saying whatever you want without consequence.
And this is a bloody ad on the TV.
It would be very strange for them to e.g censor certain kinds of drug references in the programmes they produce and air, but then permit them in adverts, no?
Then when you add in the ability to advertise prescription drugs?
Well, what could go wrong?
It's also nigh-impossible for a libel suit to succeed. And the government can't stop the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers.
You can make strong arguments either way, but at the very least you have to acknowledge that it's not all downsides.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Holocaust_denial
We don't see this as censorship, it's a safeguard against an ideology that destroyed democracy.
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.
> 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.
Yet. Give this administration a little time and they’ll solve that problem too.
(They’ve already addressed it to some degree by intimidating the press.)
But it's so much better than these alternatives.
(wait until the Americans understand what the rules for political TV broadcasts are in the UK, they will absolutely lose their minds. And the spending rules. And how little money is involved in UK elections.)
There's more serious concerns about UK libel law, and things like the proscription of Palestine Action, but generally I would say that if what you have to say is both true and important you can get your message across. Despite the newspapers and broadcasters.
Now that we've all gone through a Discord allergy phase I wonder where all that has really landed.
What's actually illegal in law to broadcast is very different from what you practically cant due to the theoretically voluntary codes. Even that guidance is broad but hard to argue with "Advertisements must contain nothing that could cause physical, mental, moral or social harm to persons under the age of 18." No reasonable person would argue you should be allowed to do that.
Imagine a world where the “AI” peddlers would be forced to make realistic claims about their “product” instead of the American advertising style lies were being spammed with everywhere…
I think this is exactly the kind of thing Trump is trying to slow walk us into while everyone is distracted by his war in Iran.
First consolidate the networks into the hands of a few loyal supporters (you don’t need a body to ban a commercial The networks refuse to air), then use the FCC to clean up the remaining opposition.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/trump-fccs-equal...
They're a private company functioning as industry self-regulation, not a government department.
Broadcasters sign up to the code, Clearcast pre-clears ads against the code.
Ofcom is the regulator in this space, Clearcast appears to be an industry effort to pre-empt Ofcom by making sure things comply before they've gone out. Broadcasters want Clearcast's seal of approval before broadcast so they know they're OK to broadcast it.
Entirely private sector, I'm not sure there's a lot that's wild about it.
It is 100% government mandated censorship.
Not allowing advertisers to lie to advertise their product is I think not a kind of "censorship" one really needs to be worried about. They're free to advertise their product otherwise, they're just not free to lie to do it.
I feel silly making this elementary point, but freedoms can't ever be absolute in a society of more than one humans. Even in the US I bet you're free to drive, but you're not free to drive drunk. You're free to have sexual relations, but not with a minor. You're free to walk anywhere you like but not in other peoples' property and not on the streets with the cars (which btw is perfectly fine in Europe and it's rules about jaywalking that are "pants on head" for us).
These are rules. Societies have rules. They should have them. There's no problem with that.
And now my 16-year old self is very disappointed that I've grown up to be a conservative, establishmentarian fossil.
___________
[1] Coincidence. We're not all called something-akis.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_whipping
It appears to be established in law that Clearcast is an assistance service, and approval doesn't seem to be sufficient or necessary by law to ensure advertising is legal. It establishes risk, rather than making a legal finding.
If Mullvad's ad was 'banned' by Clearcast, what happened is that their ad didn't meet the standards that the industry has set for itself and the broadcasters didn't want to touch it.
(edit - does this make it 'better'? I don't know. It seems to me a bit like the situation in the US with HOAs, which heavily restrict what you can and can't do with your property, but aren't exactly government either. But I favour accuracy over emotion when talking about this stuff, which is why I wanted to point out the actual structure of the system here.)
Not remotely the same as a cabal of media conglomerates getting together to agree on their own rules about how they are going to interpret and enforce government-mandated censorship in society.
Article 11 - Freedom of expression and information
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
2. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.
https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/11-freedom-expre...
The link above clarifies that this article corresponds to article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (a legal document of the Council of Europe, a different body than the EU, whose members are a strict subset of the members of the CoE). Article 10 delimits restrictions to the right of expression, as follows:
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
And as the article points out, those restrictions apply to article 11 freedoms also, acting as an upper bound:
Pursuant to Article 52(3) of the Charter, the meaning and scope of this right are the same as those guaranteed by the ECHR. The limitations which may be imposed on it may therefore not exceed those provided for in Article 10(2) of the Convention, without prejudice to any restrictions which Community competition law may impose on Member States' right to introduce the licensing arrangements referred to in the third sentence of Article 10(1) of the ECHR.
In other words, yes, there is freedom of "speech", a.k.a expression, in the EU and it, and its limits, are enshrined in law.
I hate to make assumptions but there are a few public figures from the US that have argued that "Europe" has no freedom of speech like the brave US, like Paul Graham and Elon Musk, but they're talking out of their backsides.
(slightly ambiguous conclusion that none of them have prevailed in court, but the laws can still be used to intimidate food critics)
https://www.asa.org.uk/codes-and-rulings/rulings.html?q=mull...
This smacks of viral campaign to me.
[0]: https://cybernews.com/news/and-then-mullvads-anti-surveillan...
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 1: cryptically warn people that their rights are under attack.
They are, UK is heavy surveillance, there is an article on Wikipedia dedicated just to this subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
> 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".
> way they gave a real gift to the marketing team
A gift to us in how dishonest marketing can be, yeah.
> "irrelevant to the average consumer’s experience with a VPN"
Clearcast doesn't like snake oil, it'd seem.
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.
It is no wonder to me that police procedurals are the most popular genre of TV shows in UK by quite a margin. They really are high-quality, but it does really feel like thinly-veiled propaganda (often commissioned by the BBC) portraying the State and police as the good guys in their endless quest against the baddies. Thank god there are CCTVs at every corner keeping the peace!
None of this is unique to the UK. Never seen 24? The entire theme of that show was that torture is fine, actually, and coincidentally on TV at the time people were being renditioned by the CIA.
I'd be more surprised if there was a country where this kind of thing didn't happen.
I had a minor panic/WTF moment when I saw the submission saying : "Streets of London [video] (youtube.com)".
(not sure what are the unwritten rules of self-promotion here, but hopefully providing a link in a sub-comment instead of the comment itself makes it okay-ish?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI3xj9cM0jk
I can't use Mullvad for several banks in the UK with IPv4 - if I switch to IPv6 in the app settings I sometimes can, but often I have to just disable it completely...
I can't use Youtube anonymously (i.e. without logging in) within the last month or so either, as Youtube very often won't play content due to my IP as well...
I saw the ads saying "and then?" and still didnt get it.
I like the product but i think their ad campaigns suck. If they want exposure and controversy i think they should run adverts to kill new proposed laws, target privacy hating politicians, etc.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/removing-the-support-for-forward...
It's quite bad not having a port forward when filesharing though.
1. The government cannot ban any speech in advance of publication (eg verbally making the statement; or airing; or publishing etc).
2. If proven in Court that the statement maker: (a) knew the statement was false; (b) made the statement for the purpose of influencing public opinion regarding a law or government policy or election; or for the purpose of marketing a product for sale to the public; then the penalty upon conviction is...:
here is the secret sauce: super severe penalty such as: imprisonment without chance of parole or pardon for 10 years unless you are an elected official or candidate for office, in which event life in prison; or loss of 50% of your assets; or something similar
In other words, keep freedom of speech but if you are intentionally lying to the public for the purpose of impacting government affairs or the sale of a product - then you are going to suffer an incredibly punitive penalty.
And how much "surveillance" does a VPN prevent anyway? This is a regulatory & legislative problem and I don't see how any public VPN is part of the solution.
Changing your acc number every other month and paying anonymously is much easier on Mullvad than on the ISP level. You can also get multiple people on the number very easily. And Mullvad is likely an entity outside of your home country, hence more difficult to coerce than your ISP.
In my eyes ISPs are compromised by default so the aim is to guard against them, if Mullvad is also as compromised it's more difficult for them to track me across account numbers and, even if they do, my data is then in another country, which worries me less than it being local since I'm not important enough to warrant international action.
This is not true in the EU or for the signatories of the Lugano Convention (the EU, Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway). Mullvad is very explicit that they'll abide by all EU laws. For instance, see the e-Evidence Regulation specifically written for "network-based services" like "proxy services": https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/how-set-ad-blocking-our-app / https://archive.vn/cfyPe