>Ads are speech.

No, they are not.

People have been brainwashed and legal systems have been paid and bought for to consider them as such, just like corporations have been whitewashed to be treated as "persons".

In any case, we regulate all other kinds of speech as well: explicit content, libel, classified information, cigarette ads, and so on.

Let's start there. Corporations being persons is a legal fiction to allow them to consolidate capital. Giving that fictional person human rights is abhorrent to humans. It is a crime against humans. It degrades us.

Corporations are groups of people working together. I don't see why that makes people lose their rights.

If only individuals are allowed freedom of speech NYT, CNN, and other news organizations do not have first amendment rights.

Are you sure you've thought this through?

No, it just ensures that humans acting through such legal fiction have the same rights as humans acting directly.

While granting them protections against legal liability for the things that they do in the name of such an entity.

We already ban tobacco ads on tv (in the us) is their freedom of speech violated?

I don’t think you need to count companies being able to put any message out there as free speech.

Shouting fire in a crowded theater is also speech. So is publishing a highly detailed plan for anyone to kill the president and usurp power. So is child pornography. There's a long list of precedents that free speech in America is not absolute.

And this is about Europe, which has never had an absolutist view of rights to begin with. In Europe, rights are seen as intended to be balanced against each other instead of maximizing an arbitrary set of them to 100%. You have the right to free expression (except in... most countries, so let's call it a theoretical right) as well as the right to not be preyed upon. Although it's legal to distribute chemicals, some of them are highly addictive so they're restricted. Same with social media.

Ads aren't free speech, they are the absence of it, because you are paid for a preselected speech.

That is a non sequitur.

how so?

>paid

If I get paid to say something I would have said anyway, is that not free speech?

>preselected

If I go to a protest with a sign that my friend made because I can't, that is not free speech?

That’s not even true in the United States (they’re ‘commercial speech’, which carries a still significant but lesser set of protections), never mind in Europe.

Commercial speech rights are still part of the "free speech" bundle of 1A protections.

Not in practice.

No. Ads are paying money to get a platform for that speech. Having a platform is in no way a basic right.

Exactly. Companies can put their marketing guff on their own websites!