Yeah, freedom of speech is a joke.

The concept of freedom of speech does not imply a free platform to spread your speech.

I think the movie The Insider expressed it well: "The press is free, for anyone that owns one."

Apparently that comes from an older expression dating back at least to a 1960 quote in The New Yorker: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

Well anyone can buy ads so it's not really an oligarchy.

What alternative would you propose for candidates to get they're name out?

Equal time on national television, by law. Like they do in France for example.

So replace oligopoly with gerontocracy? Who consumes national television?

Then enforce equal slots per online platform and forbid targeting by demographic cohort.

Fortunately our government can't force private entities to sponsor specific political candidates, due to our constitutional right to freedom of speech.

I'm genuinely curious how this works. What constitutes a platform?

Is TikTok a platform? Reddit? HN?

Why don't you make a proposal for what you think is the best approach?

As in state sponsored television? No one is watching CSPAN to learn anything about candidates.

Yes, that's the problem. American media is a sewer which tends inexorably toward the lowest common denominator, with dismal effects on its polity.

They might if that's the only way to see political debates and such.

Honestly it doesn't work that well. Far-rights channels will push left-wing candidates to graveyard slots, or put them against 3 trained "interviewers", etc.

Maybe it's still better than in the US? It's far from perfect.

In Spain at least, radio and TV time slots for political ads are assigned by the Electoral Commission in a session which can be attended by representatives of each candidacy.

Ah yes, I'm extremely glad that both myself and Charles Koch have the equal right to buy ads. I see no problems that could ever occur because we're equally legally allowed to spend unlimited money on political advertising.

Now... How many ads will 5 bucks buy? I'm pretty deeply in debt, but I could probably skip a meal in order to fully exercise my political freedom.

anyone can buy ads but who buys the majority of ads and ads with the greatest overall impact and impression? That is very obviously skewed. Campaigns directly have limitations on these things, PACs however, do not.

and to your question there, one example is to look at Japan. They give candidates an allotted minimum amount of time on TV for free. A candidate gets platformed purely by running. Not only that but we already do grass roots calling/texting/door-knocking campaigns... it is all definitely possible, but unlikely given that the current organization of elections heavily favors the entrenched two party system and the structures that back them (corporations, PACs, private interests, party structures etc...)

When our entire system requires billions to run and win an election, we are guaranteeing ourselves that we will continue to live in an Oligarchy.

> and to your question there, one example is to look at Japan. They give candidates an allotted minimum amount of time on TV for free. A candidate gets platformed purely by running.

I would be willing to try it in one of our laboratories-of-democracy, but my expectation is that a lot of people would run just for the free opportunity to self-promote. "Hi my name is Ron Popeil and I'm running for city council. I firmly believe that every homeowner deserves, nay, needs a Ronco food dehydrator!"

I don't know about Japan but in France at least there is some minimum threshold to prevent totally unserious random people from running. For example when I lived in France during the 2007 presidential election you needed 500 elected officials (mayors etc.) to vouch that you are a serious candidate. This threshold meant that there were 12 official candidates, unlike the hundreds in US elections, but those 12 were treated equally.

How about advertising anything other than a product or service is illegal? No more campaign ads, period. You want to know more about a candidate? Go research her yourself!

Yet when another country does it? "You're meddling in the election!".

Mhmm, okay.

Circenses et panem

I'm confused how that applies to political ads.

There is a perspective from which all politics is just entertainment with audience participation, while The Powers That Be control the things that actually matter.

(I'm not saying I endorse this view, I'm just trying to explain)

t. Kooky conspiracy theory collector

The alternative to buying ads is buying newspapers and other media outlets.

Well there is no way to ban political messaging in-practice, so we have to regulate it. Also, imo, making education accessible to the masses is important for combating the effectiveness of straight-up misinformation. Right now a good chunk of the population doesn't even seem to understand why they believe things generally, so there's plenty room to improve.

Political advertising emerged within a decade of the birth of the republic. Abraham Lincoln famously had his face plastered everywhere, and his campaign monikers like "Honest Abe" are still in use today.

The real push toward oligarchy, in my opinion, is the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs FEC. The only available remedy at this point is for the American electorate to stop relying on political ads and make a decision on policy alignment alone (like the Founding Fathers did) - this is a totally unrealistic goal in today's polarized environment.

This. Something like 5 people are almost entirely funding Trump's slump (hard to call this mess a campaign) towards the White House and for sure they are going to want pay back. This is what oligarchy looks like.

> Trump's slump [...] towards the White House

Somehow my mind supplies "slouch" instead, probably because of a poem [0]:

> And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

> Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

> The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Every time I read this poem it nails something.

Incredible sense of tension and dread.

It’s fitting that you would quote Yeats, yet another guy who predicted an apocalypse that never came.

It's a poem by a poet published right "the Great War", so I'm not sure what kind of predictive-standard you're trying to apply here.

More generally, predicting a disaster is sometimes an important step in ensuring it never occurs. Self-negating prophecies can have high utility.

5 people? Last time I was on X, nearly every Silicon Valley/tech billionaire was crooning from the rooftops for Trump.

You could argue it's the native X bias, but these were all the famous billionaires and multimillionaires who are top names in the SV space. All rooting for a Trump win, perhaps anticipating a quick Vance presidency.

A lot talk but only a ~half dozen actually bother to put together 100s of millions where their mouths are about it. I haven't looked this year but usually Bloomberg tops the chart on the blue side.

Entirely possible - I spend as little time as possible thinking about this and am just looking forward to our national nightmare of Trump being a plausible president candidate being over the week after next.

He's a plausible candidate and he's at worst a coin flip to win. Almost a 3-2 favorite based on betting markets.

https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-t...

You mean the betting markets the oligarchs have gamed? :)

Though I will agree with you that he has a coin flip chance of being president, which is totally terrifying. Is that what it felt like to be in Germany with Hitler?

Which is ironic since in 2016 everyone on SV was holding back tears of sadness over Trump getting elected. Oh how the turntables.

I do believe that something like 70% of SV can't stand Trump. You can see that in the insane amount of money Kamala has raised from SV (which probably even dwarfs Trump's XX person oligarch haul).

It is largely the sociopaths at the very very top that are Trump donors.

SV only cares about whoever will help them make more money. Everything else is virtue signaling by champagne socialists pretending to care about current day social issues and the struggles of the lower classes.

Somebody (an SV VC actually) once gave me some advice: Silicon Valley VCs will be all nice to you in front of you but talk shit behind your back. East Coast VCs will outright tell you your product is shit and that you are shit, just like your n-th order ancestors.

It was very good advice.

Of course all of the billionaires are rooting for Trump, because they want to be in business next year. Harris will understand voting for other parties, but Trump punishes disloyalty.

> 5 people? Last time I was on X, nearly every Silicon Valley/tech billionaire was crooning from the rooftops for Trump.

From what I heard Bezos interfered with Washington Post for (one of?) the first time to make them not post on endorsing a candidate for president (first time in 36 years).

What the actual reason behind it is is unsure, but they say they wanna "return to their roots". I honestly doubt it and expect its more political interest like to not be on Trumps "land in prison because radical marxist leftist" since he didn't do anything like this in the previous years.

While I am sure we would agree on the dangers posed by certain wealthy donors on both sides, the ruling of Citizen's United allows for something far more insidious - effectively a nullification of regulations set forth in a bipartisan campaign finance reform act eight years earlier (BCRA).

Essentially what we have today is a free-for-all. Any corporation can spend unlimited amounts of money (commonly referred to as "dark money") to influence politics, with virtually no oversight (i.e. FEC reporting requirements). As an individual, my ability to fund political campaigns is limited to thresholds set at the local and federal level, but a billion dollar company like FTX can give millions of dollars to politicians who put forward favorable regulations. Billion dollar AI companies will control potential future regulation in a similar manner. I'm oversimplifying here, and added some helpful links for anyone interested:

- Two Challenges for Campaign Finance Disclosure After Citizens United and Doe v. Reed - https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol19/iss4/8/

- The Death of Non-Resident Contribution Limit Bans and the Birth of the New Small, Swing State - https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol28/iss4/4/

- Why Contribution Limits on a Hybrid PAC’s Independent-Expenditure Arm are Impermissible - https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol25/iss1/10/

You could even say it started with things like Thomas Paine's pamphlet propaganda.

It seems the problem is we have a system that was born from the printing press and this system simply doesn't work in the age of the internet.

All that really holds it together are these religious sentiments about the inherent good of democracy. Sentiments that have almost nothing to do with lived experience at this point.

It seems to me because of the scaling properties, the internet finds an issue free equilibrium of "vote for me because the other person sucks."

Then it is just a race to get the most views on how much the opponent sucks.

"vote for me because the other person sucks." seems to be indeed the status quo that politicians in all democracies feel.mlst comfortable with. I think we need to add an "execute everyone on the ballot" option so that politicians have to do positive campaign because if their only contribution is making people disgusted with politics altogether, they'd be risking their lives.

A major problem of the US 2 party system is that there really is someone specifically you can point at to villainize. With multiple parties its much harder to say "everyone except us is a villain" (unless you kinda wanna be seen as crazy), in the worst case it's calling out the extremist parties, which still leaves room for many other parties.

Bezos simply told one of the leading newspapers what to do. Musk buys votes. Oligarchy is about to become reality, and it's powered by useful idiots.

its been reality...

Musk pays people to sign a petition, which is legal.

So legal that he stopped after being warned by the feds.

Who says he stopped? I can't find that in the news, and the offer is still up at:

https://petition.theamericapac.org/

Even the Biden DOJ only warned him that it "might be illegal". They're stretching the law, trying to apply a law against paying people to register to vote, but Elon will pay people who are already registered so that's quite a stretch.

Widely reported today.

Germany doesn't have negative ads criticizing opponents (at least it didn't have them when I lived there). This makes them refreshingly boring. I would guess at least 90% of the US ads are basically "the other guy is bad. Be afraid" without much content. Getting rid of the negative ads would help a lot.

You might find this interesting!

"The Impact of Negative Political Advertisement on Voter Behaviour in Germany – an Experiment"

https://www.kas.de/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=f8324712...

"Negative campaigning has been a feature of German political campaigns from the very beginning of the Federal Republic... the central idea of this paper is to examine the considerable difference between negative campaigning in Germany compared with that in the US."

It seems like you're correct that German political ads are almost never US-style 'attack ads' because among Germans, "negative campaigning in Germany is much more risky for the attacker than the impact it may have on the attacked party"

Sounds like their system isn't in the later stages of cancer like the US.

I think part of the reason why attack style ads don't work is because you usually need to choose some "villain", which just isn't feasable with more than 2 parties since voters will still have other options than you. Well, unless you vilify every party except your own but that kinda makes your party look crazy.

The closest I can think of is somewhat vilifying the extreme ends of the political spectrum since most parties can agree on that (assuming you have more than like 5 parties).

Every since election cycle started I've been bombarded by two kinds of text messages (local election):

- Don't vote for that guy he is a pedo

- Don't listen to this, he isn't a pedo, and also endorsed by local police department

Political advertising is just the tip of the corruption iceberg. When lobbying and gerrymandering is legal, can you really claim you're living in a democracy?

> When lobbying and gerrymandering is legal

Have you ever given money to the EFF? They're lobbyists. Call your represenatative? That's lobbying. Lobbying, i.e. constituents talking to electeds, is fundamental to democracy.

A huge industrial corporation spending millions on lobbyists in order to make it easier to dump pollutants into the environment without consequence, increasing their profits at the expense of local populations, is also a form of lobbying. I would bet that amoral corporate lobbying accounts for far more activity than good mission driven orgs like the EFF.

> huge industrial corporation spending millions on lobbyists in order to make it easier to dump pollutants into the environment without consequence, increasing their profits at the expense of local populations, is also a form of lobbying

Yes. You're describing a policy disagreement between a polluter and everyone else. Pick any political system and you'll have the same divide. (Again, lobbying involves hiring someone to present the case to an elected. It's categorically distinct from giving to a PAC or campaign.)

> would bet that amoral corporate lobbying accounts for far more activity than good mission driven orgs like the EFF

I mean sure, for a given value of "good." Social policy lobbying tends to vastly outstrip commercial lobbying, in part because the latter is more focussed.

Gerrymandering isn't legal. The Constitution says that the states shall have a republican form of government. The founders intended this to mean an elective republic. If the government chooses its own electors, then it's not a republic by any wild stretch of the imagination.

Yeah, we have the whole package right now. Grift on top of grift where trust and accountability wither rapidly.

I tend to agree. I was thinking last night that all elections should be write-in only. You want to vote for someone to fill an office, you have to write their name. This would change the entire system because you wouldn't be able to vote party in ten seconds flat. The propaganda and parties and grift are so cemented in that making party-line voting difficult seems like a logical first step. Ranked choice wouldn't hurt either.