Some societies need a good turning upside down.

Egypt is one of them. There is value in most of the value being in the shock value. Egypt has already done the sorts of things you suggest. It doesn't work. Putting up porn actually makes a lot of sense from a decision matrix perspective here. First of all despite the pretense otherwise Egyptians watch a lot of porn (like most countries). It's sort of a great "in your face" mirror to a country rife with hypocrisy.

It's not like the authorities give much breathing room for more nuanced protest anyway. They're already in for a very unwelcome visit to the slammer if they are caught. Might as well go as transgressive as possible while you still can.

Generally agree. However, I wonder if their intent was to draw attention to women's rights, or antagonize people regarding women's rights, in those nations. Porn was the wrong choice. Instead of pet photos, they could have shown women in positions of power and not wearing tradional clothes.

This is hilarious and harmless. Who cares?

I find it far more offensive that you wouldn't even be able to post this headline without self-censoring in the major social media apps for fear of The Algorithm. How far the internet has fallen.

I guess this is done simply to grab as much of people's attention as possible. And I mean all groups of people:

– for observers on the road, make them more likely to film this and share on social media;

– for news agencies, make them allocate as much coverage as possible for this incident;

– for regular readers, simply to more likely grab theirs attention.

It's all about consent, isn't it, we don't consent to advertising in every public space and yet we can't get away from it.

> And you might say, "Not everyone wants to see ads!" And totally agree! But like, the people who have to look at this eyesore now have to deal with a different eyesore.

That’s why across the world we should ban blanket advertisements like these. They’re a dumb eyesore.

Porn just exposes what is obviously annoying. But advertisements themselves are a sort of mind-virus you can’t opt out of. I can choose to not buy cable TV. I can’t (reasonably) choose to not walk outside in the public space.

For it to work it has to be unpleasant. In fact, the more unpleasant it is, the more it works. It has to be more unpleasant than making the decision to remove the billboards altogether.

Showing a nice animal or a 'you're welcome' message achieves the goal of removing the ad, but falls short of fixing the root of the problem: the billboard existing. As long as it exists, the temptation and incentive to put ads on it also exists.