Honestly? I think all political advertising shouldn't be allowed, it gives those with a disproportionate amount of capital a lever of influence that runs counter to the democratic process. If you want to push an issue you should have to organize people who believe in your cause and have them involved. There's been plenty of examples of microtargeting's influence that makes me think it has no place in the political discourse.

No idea if we'll ever get there.

Yep, it's pretty much how campaigns here in Germany work. There's about a few weeks of campaigning during which political posters and so on can be put up, but otherwise there's strict regulation on political ads.

Also the parties are significantly publicly financed and the amount of money is much lower, due to the much shorter campaign span, making the process much more egalitarian. For example the largest party in Germany, the CDU/CSU spent 30 million for the entire 2017 general election campaign (about 30-40% of the vote generally), and the smallest parties spend a few million with about 5% of the vote. So not much difference.

I'm completely shocked when I see US candidates in primaries spend tens of millions, or individual senators.

How does that work with FB? Let’s say you have a German politician with a subreddit about him. Does that not count as advertising? I’m genuinely curious because I’m certain your country has at least considered this scenario.

Up until now there hasn't really been laws addressing social media which falls outside of what is considered "Rundfunk" (basically television and radio mainly), but over the last year or two a lot of people have started demanding to apply the existing laws to social media as well. I think at the moment they're only required to label paid political ads.

Culturally though it has a greatly diminished role. If I remember correctly, during the last European election the largest parties spent about 500k on social media ads. We're still overwhelmingly dominated by traditional media. Angela Merkel has no social media presence, and if I had to guess even the most popular politicians maybe have a few ten or maybe a hundred thousand followers on Twitter.

You’re saying they spent 500k over a few weeks? How is that even possible?

You just have legally enforced spending limits.

Someone running for parliament in the UK, for example, is allowed to spend about $0.26 per voter † in an average constituency (of 72200 voters).

It's certainly not a perfect system, but it does mean if you earn £100k it's very easy to become an MP's largest donor.

† (The rules are more complicated than that, of course - there's separate spending by the national party, one free mailing by the royal mail, rules for tracking the equivalent value of volunteered professional services, and so on...)

parliamentary systems have less of the US two-party brinksmanship that explains all the robocalls and takedown ads.

Interestingly, the law in Germany is far weaker than in the US, or at least it was before Citizen United.

There are no limits on donations, for example. Anything below €10,000 does not even have to be reported. And reporting only happens once per year.

"Invest" might be a better term then "Spend"

How would you organize people to your cause without doing anything that would be considered 'advertising'? Unless you narrowly define advertising in a way that is easily worked around..

Same way we can have an open discussion on this lovely site we call HN.

While I'm not going to claim to know every definition of advertising, generally if money changes hands for priority over organic traffic that fits the bill pretty well for me. Doubly so if you're able to target specific categories and demographics. I think what makes microtargeting so bad in particular is that you can do things that would be negative to the broader public but narrow the scope so you have multiple sides of a campaign that doesn't let the public have a reasonable view of that campaign/issue as a whole.

What you're calling the democratic process is simply people willing to spend capital on a cause. It's just that their capital is time (and time is money). It doesn't make them any holier, and there's nothing morally or ethically superior about having to "organize people" without spending money. Put another way, I may be able to exert my political voice using money and I am not less deserving of having my opinion heard or any less deserving of influencing others than someone whose primary input is time (in lieu of other life pursuits).

“Time is money” is a cliche, not a fact. There are plenty of people who have lots of money but didn’t spend commensurate time getting it, as there are plenty of people who spend inordinate amounts of time making little money.

Sure. You can earn more money per unit of time by creating greater value for others. But my point is that saying "political spending is bad" doesn't make sense. Everyone is expending unequal efforts in different facets of their life. If I am busy keeping my small business afloat and can't afford to put in the kind of time a dedicated activist puts into organizing, I think I should still be able to use what resources I have to influence politics.

Otherwise, what we're saying is that everyone must dedicate significant portions of their life to on-the-ground organizing and direct action to be on an even footing relative to others. That doesn't sound like the kind of society most would want to live in. It means we'd need to forego other activities, both economic ones and leisure, just to engage in this artificially constrained political system.

I was just pointing out the foundation of your argument is categorically false. We can quibble over the rest - such as “creating greater value for others” being a completely arbitrary concept. Perhaps a better argument to make for your position is that money collated by organizations such as the ACLU, BLM (or the NRA), is used for political advertising, and therefore justifiable. I would personally find that argument difficult to refute. On the other hand, I personally think 100% of lobbying, which includes political advertising, should be illegal.

> You can earn more money per unit of time by creating greater value for others.

The majority of wealth that gets funneled into politics does not come from people who have high wages, it comes from capital invests or directly from corporate donors. This directly means that those for whom the system already works well have an outsized influence in making sure that the system will work even better for them in the future.

> That doesn't sound like the kind of society most would want to live in.

I think you need to recalibrate your understanding of what people want. Encouraging people to get involved in their communities and government sounds way better than making it necessary for politicians to solicit bribes (politely called fundraising) to keep their jobs.

Is it really that difficult for you to understand that being a squilloraire gives you the ability to politically out-maneuver almost-everyone-who-isn't?

What kind of mental gymnastics do you have to perform to disregard the tone of this particular global conversation?

At least Twitter is mostly public. That allows stupid stuff to be opposed, and harmful things to be reported.

With Facebook, and especially Groups, people are fully immersed in their self-selected filter bubble, and admins can run their colloidal-silver-scams without interference.

Could we prefer they no longer exist? Examples: there’s nothing an oil company can turn into that continues to sell oil in a non harmful manner. Altria tried to adopt vaping (still harmful) to move away from cigarettes (very harmful!).

Some businesses and their products should simply not exist due to the harm they cause. I apologize upfront if this doesn’t seem genuine and instead, unnecessarily controversial.

I'd like to hear the arguments behind the downvotes you're getting. To me, it seems that there are some things that, for the sake of the continued existence of our species (and countless others) on this planet, must simply be seen with clarity.

Our economy cannot currently operate without oil. Even if we replace it for energy production, we still need oil to produce other types of products.

Saying we should move towards using significantly less oil and that companies should pay for the negative externalities they cause is rational, saying oil companies should fundementally not exist is irrational.

Similarly, while I find the way that cigarette companies operate to be abhorrent (specifically they way they use international law to fight packaging and health laws), people deserve the right to smoke if they choose as well as the right to be free of abusive advertising of dangerous products.

We are able to synthesize methane from electricity+air with high-enough efficiency to use it as a chemical source. Some exotic stuff like asphalt might be difficult to synthesize, but most uses should be replaceable with a methane-based synthesis. Theoretically we could start a tax that progressively dis-incentivizes crude oil and natural gas extraction, but this is going to be hard unless US, EU, and CN agree on this, because the economic advantages of operating a refinery that stamps "synthetic" on their fossil products would be massive.