People need to think very carefully about the consequences of any policy they propose to curb this sort of behavior. Do we really want Facebook making judgment calls about the content of political ads? Do they need to do thorough real-life identity verification of people buying any ads, or any ads that may be construed as political? Then the real kicker: does every ad provider need to do this, or just the ones that are too big to fail? Requiring that level of effort would quash small ad providers in the same way that onerous copyright verification laws would quash small content hosts. Not doing so has its own obvious problems.
How much better would life be if there had to be an in-person verification for advertisers... along the lines of an EV cert. Man, how much crappy advertisements, scam, malware ads would just disappear if this were a requirement all around.
Hmm. Maybe small players could outsource verification to specialists with economies of scale. It would let some crap through, but it might be worth it overall.
> Then the real kicker: does every ad provider need to do this, or just the ones that are too big to fail? Requiring that level of effort would quash small ad providers in the same way that onerous copyright verification laws would quash small content hosts.
It comes down to what you think is more important. Lessening false advertising that manipulates the democratic process (and of course the big question is to what extent this can be lessened by such policies) or having an environment conducive to small advertising companies.
You're talking about secondary consequences, and if you want to keep the comparison fair then you also need to talk about the secondary consequences of the manipulation of the democratic process.
I was talking about the primary consequence if you want put a banner after being given money, you don't necessarily have to be an advertising company. I think you are assuming everyone uses advertising companies to advertise, but that's not true even though this is how we'd get there.
What I said applies to that. I said "It comes down to what you think is more important. Lessening false advertising that manipulates the democratic process (and of course the big question is to what extent this can be lessened by such policies) or having an environment conducive to small advertising companies." Change 'companies' to 'provider' (or whatever word you want to use) and that choice still applies.
I see no good solutions.