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Attention Must Be Paid: Commercial Speech, User-Generated Ads, And The Challenge Of Regulation, Rebecca Tushnet
Attention Must Be Paid: Commercial Speech, User-Generated Ads, And The Challenge Of Regulation, Rebecca Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article examines the dynamics that drive advertisers to push into new formats, and the law’s ability to regulate them. I argue that it will remain possible, and constitutional, to identify advertising and subject it to prohibitions on false and misleading claims, even for ads in unconventional formats. The article also addresses the ways in which regulators were caught off-guard by these new formats. In particular, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which frees online service providers and users from liability for content generated by other users, poses some unanticipated barriers to regulating advertising. Yet despite section 230’s provisions, …
Fighting Freestyle: The First Amendment, Fairness, And Corporate Reputation, Rebecca Tushnet
Fighting Freestyle: The First Amendment, Fairness, And Corporate Reputation, Rebecca Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
There are three distinct groups who might want to engage in speech about commercial entities or to constrain those commercial entities from making particular claims of their own. Competitors may sue each other for false advertising, consumers may sue businesses, and government regulators may impose requirements on what businesses must and may not say. In this context, this Article will evaluate a facially persuasive but ultimately misguided claim about corporate speech: that because consumers regularly get to say nasty things about corporations under the lax standards governing defamation of public figures, corporations must be free to make factual claims subject …