Indeed this is the way it works but I think you restrict your view by taking social media as some society constant. If there is no way for the public to find the information it looks for in a meaningful way in facebook or twitter, it will migrate to something else or push it to change.

It might push the platforms to feed people with an equal share of all sides instead of feeding them what the "want" and anyone else has to pay

Paid advertising to get ideas out has existed for at least as long as we've had newspapers and probably a lot longer.

Take this case, for example. URL says it all: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/muslims-take-out-full-page-n...

It sounds nice to say that we are going to keep some communication channels free of political speech. It is an option. But it is possible (I claim: likely) that more communication leads to better political outcomes, so sealing off easy-to-use channels like advertising may not actually help.

> But it is possible (I claim: likely) that more communication leads to better political outcomes

Not when that speech is deceptive, and particularly not when people can pay money to a company to ensure that those lies are disseminated as widely as possible.

> But it is possible [...] that more communication leads to better political outcomes

I believe this is true and also that this is basically the hypothesis motivating freedom of speech under law. However, I believe that modern digital political advertising is a very different kind of communication than the open, genuine discussion in a free marketplace of ideas that free speech advocates often envision.

I think one big problem is information fragmentation taken to the extreme: Each person is now subjected to his or her own individually-targeted propaganda. It is a non-genuine, abusive form of individualized communication that in my opinion tends to erode opportunity for political consensus.

In my view, some forms of political advertising are perfectly acceptable. Attending a political debate and arguing well for your candidacy is perfectly acceptable. Enlisting Cambridge Analytica or foreign intelligence services to employ individual psychometric profiles to serve up the most effectively manipulative propaganda is not acceptable.

Advertising that is more generally broadcast as opposed to narrowly targeted is perfectly acceptable, and potentially even desirable for political discourse. Advertising that is "too" targeted is potentially corrosive to political discourse. I would love to see proposals on how to draw the line, legislatively, that would address these concerns and also pass strict scrutiny.

Social media works this way on the scale of millions of people.

People disseminate unpaid political messages all the time. Curated feeds or not, they are seeing things which are popular amongst them and they reshare posts they like.

You can argue that people aren't interested enough in politics, but paid ads are not a good and balanced way to get people engaged. It leads to them having an even more skewed view of politics as it biases them towards the interest of those with the most money for political ads (as opposed to what is best for their community). Those interest can align in theory, but if we are trying to select the optimal system, why add paid advertisements if we don't need to?

Twitter bans political ads, I am pretty sure they still plan on making money.

Twitter,Facebook and Google are all same institute to damp down privacy towards full controlled speech if any.

Please, don't use these sandboxes .. Programmers create real social media for people. Make internet great again, please.

> Feeds are highly curated.

Nitpick: IMHO, feeds aren't curated, since curation implies some kind of human judgement at the least (and preferably an expert's judgement). Feeds are algorithmically sorted. Calling them curated debases the term.