How Peace Is Kept off Billboards in Washington, DC
David Swanson / World BEYOND War

First they came for the peace activists
And I didn’t say anything
Because the censorship was extreme and there was no way left to say anything

(August 28, 2025) — It’s not that extreme yet. But it’s moving in that direction. At World BEYOND War we’ve sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed to get billboards and other large advertisements past the corporate and government censors in various parts of the world.

In Washington, D.C., there are no stationary billboards on which you can advertise anything other than “Buy my widget.” There is a mobile billboard that is open to all good causes. The metro train and bus system, at least in the past, has allowed ads for military recruitment, fighter jets, or “buy my widget,” but not for peace if the peace ad hints at opposition to war. We once put up some ads in Metro stations that said “Peace on Earth” and (very very small at the bottom) “worldbeyondwar.org.” I don’t know if we could get away with that anymore.

Last year I was pleasantly shocked when the Clear Channel corporation said yes to letting us put on bus stops all over downtown Washington, D.C., ads that said “Stop Sending Weapons to Israel” and (not very small at the bottom) “Paid for by World BEYOND War.” We put those up for a month. If we’d kept them up for a year, at some point we would have been told that they were no longer acceptable.

Recently, someone sent me a clever drawing that they thought would make a good ad. Clear Channel and the bus stops came to mind. I added color, put a mask on one guy’s face, and stuck “Paid for by World BEYOND War” at the bottom before sending it over for approval or rejection.

This one was rejected by Clear Channel. But at least their stated reasons were not what you might expect. The basis for censoring this one supposedly had nothing to do with ICE, or Israel, or fans of historic western expansion, or Trump’s military occupation of DC. Instead, the problem, they told me, was that cartoons and ethnic groups are considered a highly toxic combination. Clear Channel claimed to be afraid that a Native American or a Jew could be offended by an ad, even if the ad very clearly condemned genocidal assaults against Native Americans and (among others) Jews.

Interestingly, the helpful person at Clear Channel who told me this would email me on any topic other than censorship, which she would only discuss on the phone. She said, on the phone, that the “president of the DC and Baltimore market” (who turns out to just be a Clear Channel employee) had rejected the ad as not meeting Clear Channel’s content guidelines. When I asked to see the guidelines, I was told that they are “internal only.” She also said that the DC Department of Transportation had rejected the ad as being “an attack ad” that could be “offensive to cultural groups.” I contacted the DC Department of Transportation which never replied except to claim that it was going to reply.

The Clear Channel person I spoke with did not think that our ad might offend fascistic fans of lawless thuggery carried out in obedience to orders, only Native Americans or Jews. She also said that Clear Channel, as a publicly traded company, needed to consider its shareholders and avoid the appearance of holding any point of view on anything.

Words were the way to go, she told me. Our previous ad had just contained words. Images were the problem. If our ad last year had contained an image of a gun, she said, it would have been rejected. I pointed out that Clear Channel puts up ads for military recruitment and for weapons of war.

Without replying to that, she did read to me part of the content guidelines. It said that no ad could trivialize a great human tragedy such as 911, the Holocaust, the Irish famine . . . and there were a few others that I forget. She suggested removing the left and middle two-thirds of the ad. I thanked her and said we’d think about it.

Then the text messages started. She sent me an editorial cartoon and suggested we use it as it would be more likely to be approved (presumably she meant that we should use something similar to it, and not actually a copyrighted cartoon):

She suggested that I ask Chat GTP to design an ad, and she sent me various, fairly elaborate ideas for the wording to feed into Chat GTP for that ad, which oddly included wording about Japanese internment camps, segregated lunch counters, border detention cages “(subtle, not graphic)” and instructions on color palettes, etc.

But then she also texted to say that her manager wanted just ICE in the ad and “not pointing fingers at any groups of people.”

I decided to call their bluff and give them just words. Here’s what I sent over:

This was, of course, rejected. But the reason is interesting. They challenged me to prove that it was a fact that Ukraine, Palestine, and U.S. cities were militaristic and that I was not slandering them. I pointed out that there were well-known wars in Ukraine and Palestine, and armed troops patrolling Washington. It didn’t matter. There could somehow be something false in the words of the ad — an ad that even a child could tell you was making an argument against something and referring people to a website to consider that argument in depth.

All right. Clear Channel still had a sliver of pretense left, I thought. Never blame on subservience to a fascistic climate what you can blame on a system rendered incompetent by good but idiotic intentions, right?

So I tried sending over a version with almost the exact same wording they had approved a year before:

This one was rejected. But the excuse was less interesting and more transparent. “Weapons” and “War,” they said, fall into the category of “shocking content” — which is verboten.

Remember, this same company advertises joining the U.S. military and buying fighter jets that very few viewers of ads actually purchase, but which are weapons used in wars.

We’re going to keep trying, approaching other companies, modifying the designs, dropping giant banners off buildings and painting walls ourselves, and everything else we can imagine.

If you can help out with funding or ideas, please go here: worldbeyondwar.org/billboardsproject