[quarkral]

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?

[Traster]

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.

[quarkral]

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.

[alexandercrohde]

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.