State of Washington sues Facebook and Google over failure to disclose spending

Does't cost much. Is pretty effective.

Huge sums of money is really only needed for GOTV and propaganda.

They could be upset about paying money directly or indirectly to the poiticians.

i.e. perhaps it is fine spending money trying to lecture politicians, but not giving the money to politicians and policymakers.

Further, there are many options out there which don't involve spending money to spread a message. Write a book and you can be paid to spread your message. If don't have the time a YouTube commentator can also get paid as can bloggers etc.

Granted saying ideas that can't spread virally can't spread at all may not be great. But, it does offer some forms of protection and IMO is more in spirit with the core idea of Democracy.

You use the fact people who won't listen unless you spend money won't hear your message.

> Spending money is how people with novel ideas expose it to more people and can hope to compete against established ideas that don’t need to be marketed.

It's also how you mix and dilute your idea into an ocean of meritless crap that nobody would care about unless someone spent money to have the likes of Facebook and Google shout it at them.

It particularly cements the idea that the only way to get novel (usually you'd aim for "good") ideas heard is by paying money to Facebook, Google or that other big media conglomerate (where their money buys "nation-wide local" "news").

Problem is, people with the good novel ideas are usually not the parties with a lot of money (because both are statistically rare).

And that means that the parties with a lot of money will decide which people get heard at all. Regardless whether they have good ideas, novel ideas, or even remotely plausible ideas.

And there are plenty of laws limiting speech for example in schools. So, outright limiting say TV advertising would be completely constitutional and have the side effect of limiting exactly the types of speech you're talking about without constitutional issues.

The whole point of free speech is to prevent single origin messages. To promote more ideas and perspectives. And prevent people from shutting up opposite views.

But the constitution isn't perfect. Its hard to make sure your hard rules will work for all context.

I think in this case, there's a fear that now that money is getting more and more disproportionate and concentrated into a single origin. The power to speak will follow into that same disproportionate single origin.

Maybe free speech still enables all to speak, but the uneven distribution of money causes some to speak much louder. So the question is, could this be detrimental to democracy? Is it possible it hurts our political ability to focus on what trully matters to most and to come up with the best ideas on how to effectively get it?

I don't know, its hard to say. Maybe we need some simulations. But if it were true, then clearly something should be done to address this loophole. Forcing transparency into who spent the money is one possible solution. Maybe you could cap out money each one can spend to speak. There's probably other ways also.

I think the problem is that this isn’t a philosophical question. It’s an ethical one. But, the only way to be ‘fair and balanced’ is to purport it as philosophical.

If you need an example (which you should not) I worked for a small (~100 employee) phone company and we complied with all tax laws nationwide at a federal, state, county and municipality level. That’s a lot of regulation. It was a lot of work. We did it. What’s Google’s excuse?

And it isn't some odd law that the company would easily forget about - FB and Google both get their revenue from advertising, and political advertising disclosure laws are pretty common. While Washington might have some stricter rules, I'd expect the companies to have a division working on compliance.

Google is still responsible for their actions, just like you and me.

- it’s barely outrageous - doesn’t seem to be about the first amendment - nor is it much of a violation

If you happen to want to say something nice about one candidate or mean about another in the airtime you bought it's hard to argue that's not covered by free speech rights.

You can argue that this has perverse effects - but the courts have consistently held that free speech has wide latitude even when it has negative effects. Exceptions are extremely limited and the harm has to be immediate and direct.

Why is Anderson Cooper allowed to spread his opinions with the aid of a multi hundred million dollar distribution system but I can’t buy 2000 dollars of Facebook ads?

Limits on funding speech are limits on speech.

Limit on what? On speaking about politics? On buying ads? On paying people to write about politics? On hiring consultants to develop advertising strategies? On speaking about anything government cares about? So if NYT spends $1000 per subscriber on politicial writer's salaries in March, it has to be shut down until the next January because it's over the political speech limit?

This of course sounds insane, because you can't put limit on spending money on speech without putting limits on actual speech. Because it's one and the same - publishing speech costs money, and money is the way to get speech published.

Fortunately, US still has freedom of speech, which is not measured in dollar limits.

Obligatory content-related content: If I were the Attorney General, I think a suit like this, whether successful or not, would undoubtedly be one of the high points of my career.