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Comment by adam12 | Hacker News Reader

Just ban all political ads.

sounds easy but in practice hard. You can run ads on political and social issues that directly correlate with one candidate's campaign. What about those ads?

But then you could also be running ads to push a public issue such as climate change independent of anyone's campaign.

How do you differentiate between the two?

People keep contending that it's difficult to differentiate what a political advert is, but actually that's the wrong question. You don't really need to ban political advertisements, you simply ban adverts from political organisations. The Federal government already has rules in place to determine what a political action committee is. So for a start you just ban all PACs, 501(c)(4|5|6)s and 527 organisations. That basically covers the overwhelming majority of political advertising, and then we can review later if we think it hasn't been effective.

The reason it's difficult to differentiate is because currently media backlash is actually the only accountability any of these tech companies have for doing the right thing. For example, there's basically no government regulation for making sure companies encrypt your passwords properly; the only incentive to do so is because the media would make a joke out of the company if unencrypted passwords were ever leaked.

So you can ban advertisements from political organizations, but if a third-party or the Russians start running misinformation ads on climate change and pro-life, the media won't exactly recognize it as a "non political advertisement" and leave off.

In the election of 2016, most of the misinformation was not directly initiated by the political candidates. Your suggestion wouldn't affect any of the misinformation spread in 2016.

Meh, those are just details. Banning political ads will definitely hit some grey area, but whatever that grey area is would be better than where we are now.

What counts as a political ad, in a world where many would claim "everything is political?"

Simple, is the ad for a product or not?

So, the Humane Society or Susan G. Komen Foundation soliciting donations for charitable work is a political ad?

Just ban all ads.

So should be only left with live face to face stump speeches?

It is possible for the state to ensure that political parties get media airtime without having to buy ads.

Canada, Ireland, and the UK all do this with Party Political Broadcasts:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_political_broadcast

The UK uses think tanks to get around media restrictions on political advertising. They put out press releases that get reported as "news".

But these are limited to political parties. You are proposing to take away the voice of SuperPACs who make the lion's share of the paid advertisement in a modern campaign. If billionaires don't get a voice how can they control the government? You are going to make them go back to regular lobbying and regulatory capture! What a travesty!

No thabks. individuals need to have the right to be able to pay the standard publishing fare to publish their voices. That right shouldnt be reserved solely for state sanctioned political parties. That's a sad sad state of affairs.

I mean, I'm sure PACs can post to their facebook pages like the rest of us normies do. No need to purchase more eyeballs!

Obviously not–but I'm also not brimming with confidence that the road we're presently heading down is definitely better.

There are many ways to promote yourself and your message on Facebook itself that do not involve paying Facebook.

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