I completely agree with what you're saying about the difficulty of cleanly separating political vs nonpolitical speech, but for specifically the case of U.S. political issues, one could imagine a hack of defining political ads as "anything that would need to be reported to the FEC as an expenditure."
Starting somewhere bad without a plan is actively bad.
Here's the thing, people. FB and Twitter are pretty much garbage. That's fine, and we all mostly agree about that.
Here's the worst part of social media in general: it's uniting the absolute shittiest of the Republicans with the absolute shittiest of the Democrats and encouraging them both to get together and form a government agency that defines "truth" and then forces private entities to enforce that truth.
There is literally nothing Twitter or Facebook or any other social media website could do that would be this actually bad.
It's real hard to find a reason to be upset with a blanket ban on political ads on Twitter. You can still say what you want to say, but Twitter isn't going to accept money to help you promote your message. Good for them.
While I agree with you, the most vocal of Twitter users likely won’t. Some will be furious if NRA ads are allowed, and others furious if ACLU ads are allowed. And for some reason those are the people society has decided to listen to.
A sympathetic news outlet is often treading on the edge of political advertising as well. Some TV station airing a favorable or unfavorable documentary on a candidate during election season when executives of those stations have publicly supported (or not supported) a candidate or party seems no different than a PAC buying an ad on that same station.
Imagine if we applied this standard to a story of significant presidential malfeasance in October. Something so terrible no one would ever vote for the person. Should we?
Independent political action committees (both PACs and Super PACs) need to report their spending to the FEC, tied to the candidate their independent expenditure is in favor of/support.
That covers most political spending on the national level. Political spending for state offices (which dont have to report to the FEC) is a whole other story.
The difficulty is that we once used propaganda in war time, because we needed it. The problem now is that you don’t know who is doing it, and for what.
And propaganda back then wasn’t so clear cut. We were allied with Russia and at the end their population was truly decimated.
nowadays most of us have no idea what is propaganda and what isn't. heck sometimes you eventually research it and realize stuff you believed was true for decades because you were just told so by some authoritative source (like "TV" or what not really), turn out, is between misleading to flat out wrong. Note that I'm not even thinking about this in terms of politics. It seems to be the case for so many different things, sometimes due to ignorance, sometimes malice.
