Billboards and Censorship

DEFINITION: Large advertising signs, usually erected outdoors

SIGNIFICANCE: While representations made in billboard advertisements have achieved greater legal protection, society has developed more sophisticated and judicially acceptable methods of controlling their display.

Effective and comparatively inexpensive forms of advertising, billboards have publicized such wide-ranging products as food, clothes, fertilizer, alcohol, cigarettes, topless clubs, churches, museums, and cultural events. Often, they have caused serious controversy because of their public nature and the tendency of advertisers to get people’s attention through provocation and shock techniques—such as eye-catching images and sensational language. Prior to the 1960s, all levels of government in the United States could exercise great discretion over billboards. Commercial speech did not garner any form of protection under the First Amendment.

Even with such government freedom to regulate, however, billboard proliferation dominated early America. In the mid-1960s, Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, promoted passage of the Highway Beautification Act, a law that allowed municipalities to remove unwanted billboards considered aesthetically unpleasant. However, the law required municipalities to reimburse billboard owners at a current multiple of their annual revenues. This proved to be expensive, and most municipalities had limited resources.

During the mid-1970s, the courts began searching for forms of protected speech within commercial advertisements. By nature, laws tend to be discriminatory. It is the depth of such discrimination that is the basis for constitutional analysis. The courts began testing to see if the burden on advertisers’ First Amendment rights of expression outweighed the government’s right to regulate.

The federal government obtains its power to regulate billboards through the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause. The right of local government to regulate for the health and safety of its citizens is limited by the First Amendment’s free speech clause. The First Amendment is implicitly brought to bear upon municipalities by the Fourteenth Amendment. If protected speech exists in a billboard message, then courts apply a strict scrutiny test under which few laws can survive.

To avoid free speech problems, many practical ways of billboard censorship have evolved. For example, municipalities may regulate billboards to prevent public displays of obscenity, to provide for their proper placement, and to protect the aesthetics of a community through zoning laws. The subjectivity involved in determining and legally defining obscenity has made many obscenity laws ineffective. However, commercial messages that constitute public nuisances and affect public safety, such as nudity on billboards near busy intersections, can be successfully regulated. By the early 1980s, the most effective way to regulate billboards was through the use of zoning laws. Communities began designing master plans to control neighborhood development. Zoning allows for the collection of fees and taxes and the establishment of time-consuming approval processes. Zoning can ban billboards from areas near schools, child-care centers, and certain residential neighborhoods. Moratoriums temporarily halt the expansion of billboards while communities analyze their zoning potential. Moratoriums can be extended many times for various reasons.

By the mid-1980s, municipalities throughout the United States were significantly reducing the number of billboards without having to worry about improper content-based censorship. The cities of Hurst and Grand Prairie, Texas, for example, completely halted all billboard construction. The city of Fort Worth, while not banning them, reduced the number of old billboards by 438, while limiting billboards to only twenty-seven.

Four US states have complete bans on billboards. Hawaii moved to remove all existing billboards and prevent new ones in the 1920s, followed by Vermont and Maine in the 1970s and 1980s. Alaska approved a statute keeping billboards out of the state in 1998. In 2014, a judge ruled that the city of Los Angeles's attempt to restrict certain types of electronic billboards violated the freedom of speech guaranteed by California's constitution. Many municipalities continued to struggle with conflict between opponents and supporters of billboards into the 2020s. In City of Austin, Texas v. Reagan National Advertising of Texas Inc. (2022), the US Supreme Court upheld local restrictions on converting static billboards to digital ones. The Court ruled that such distinctions were content-neutral and thus did not violate the First Amendment.

Governments in other countries have also moved to ban or limit billboards, most commonly at the local level. British Columbia enacted a law to prevent billboards from distracting drivers by requiring that they be installed at a setback from highways. In 2007, São Paulo, Brazil, passed its Clean City Law, which led to the removal of fifteen thousand billboards within a year on the grounds that they were visual pollution. Cities around the world, including Paris, France, and Tehran, Iran, also took steps to limit billboard advertising in the 2010s and 2020s.

Bibliography

Ali, Dildar, et al. “Minimizing Regret in Billboard Advertisement under Zonal Influence Constraint.” Cornell University, 2 Feb. 2024, arxiv.org/abs/2402.01294. Accessed 4 May 2026.

Burnett, John. “In Cities Across Texas, Activists Battle Billboard Companies.” NPR, 6 Sept. 2014, www.npr.org/2014/09/06/346153394/in-cities-across-texas-activists-battle-billboard-companies. Accessed 4 May 2026.

“City of Austin, Texas v. Reagan National Advertising of Texas Inc.” Oyez, 21 Apr. 2022, www.oyez.org/cases/2021/20-1029. Accessed 4 May 2026.

Gudis, Catherine. Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape. Routledge, 2008.

Mahdawi, Arwa. “Can Cities Kick Ads? Inside the Global Movement to Ban Urban Billboards.” The Guardian, 12 Aug. 2015, www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-kick-ads-ban-urban-billboards. Accessed 4 May 2026.

Zahniser, David. “Judge Rejects Los Angeles’ Billboard Ban.” The Los Angeles Times, 22 Oct. 2014, www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-1023-billboard-20141023-story.html. Accessed 4 May 2026.