News from Home: Whiskeygate

This weekend, news broke over a naming issue with Beer Expo Finland 2014 (formerly known as Beer and Whiskey Expo Finland 2014). Southern Finland's Administrative Agency (official nickname is Avi but lets call them SFAA) decreed the use of the word "whiskey" in the name of the event was against alcohol advertising regulations. The strict laws among other things forbid the use of overly positive imagery in beer and cider ads. Advertising hard liquor is banned altogether. The event was allowed to go ahead on the condition the word "whiskey" was dropped from their name and adverts, and that Google won't find links to the event when searching for whiskey. Event organizers even had to ask private bloggers to remove mentions of whiskey when writing about the event.

Naturally this sparked online outrage in the spirit of good internet slacktivism and trolling. People were infuriated by the seemingly autocratic extent the law was being interpreted. Many vented about SFAA stepping on the freedom of speech in the case of the targeted blogs. Social media lit up with protest action. #viskigate (whiskeygate) was trending on Twitter throughout the weekend, this delightful Tumblr blog surfaced, and other online communities got on the band wagon with such intensity that the director of SFAA issued a statement saying their measures MIGHT have been overbearing. What the director didn't address was that their efforts had been rendered completely ineffective anyway, as everyone in Finland now knows of the Beer Expo taking place at the end of the month.

This follows up on the debate whether or not social media connectivity violates alcohol advertising statutes. There has been talk about disabling share functions for bars and other businesses that make their living on the sale of alcohol. Finns have a hard time agreeing on social policy unanimously. However, right after tightening punishments for rapists and pedophiles, reforming alcohol legislation is probably the most agreed upon change people would like to see.

Of course the law is the law; you cannot temporarily amend something because it causes a slight inconvenience. It is also true that targeted alcohol adverts to young adults can proliferate social issues that arise out of excess alcohol consumption, and there should be regulation in place to protect consumers from misleading adverts. Yet when people set out to ban specific words from being used to describe an event dedicated to beer and whiskey connoisseurs in the name of promoting public health, something has gone terribly wrong. This weekend has shown the absolute idiocy of certain alcohol laws and how fearing a word like whiskey or Voldemort for that matter does not make bad things go away. Hopefully this will spur constructive change that will improve Finnish bureaucratic attitudes towards minor issues like this.