I'm trying to understand the article's premise. Is all political advertising immoral? Is it something about the way the ads were distributed that make them immoral? Is it just immoral because the politics itself was "wrong"?
> the Electoral Commission found that the youth-focused campaign, BeLeave, had been joint-working with the official Vote Leave campaign — yet the pair had not jointly declared spending thereby enabling the official campaign to overspend by almost half a million pounds. And that overspend went straight to Aggregate IQ to run targeted Facebook ads.
More broadly, we're in a new era of political advertising that we haven't fully grappled with yet. It used to be that all of your advertising was public, so it was possible to see what promises are being made, what kind of terminology is being used, etc. etc. In the Facebook era you can hyper-target your ads to only show to a small subsection of people, without anyone knowing what you're saying. Facebook's recent moves have meant that advertisers have to publicly disclose all the ads they are showing to avoid this issue, but it wasn't retroactive. This data is from before Facebook disclosed that information.
Sadly this kind of "overspending" is effectively legal in the US due to PACs. Good to hear it's illegal in the UK, but seems that isn't stopping people.
This. Further, digital media has become so effective and audience data so refined that it can be readily and cheaply weaponized by hostile actors to conduct a form of "soft" warfare on the battleground of peoples' news and social feeds that skirts existing broadcast-centric political advertising laws. This is why they are in drastic need of an update via something like the Honest Ads Act [1].
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/198...
If say, before the 1990s, a national candidate sent out targeted mailers to some little town in flyover country, no one would have ever seen them.
We're in a similar but imo potentially not much worse situation because if anything it's easier to publicize that it happens.
It seems strange to you because the person getting a targeted ad is in the next room over instead of next voting district, but it's the same principle.
Secondly, the scale and efficiency with which one could target was rather limited. Specifically, the candidate would have a hard time not only “targeting” the right audience but also find it rather impossible to customize the content of the mailer to individual recipient.
It is not based on the same principle - one involves human actors and associated inefficiencies and “unscalability” while other involves mindless robots over zealously bombarding “targeted” audience with deception and lies.
Later the "legit" advertising could be more effective on those people.
ICO, the UK data protection regulator, has fined groups of both sides for data protection violations.
We have strict laws about the ways elections are run for a reason, and yes, lying about funding is immoral, and is incompatible with Nolan Principles for Public Office.
Distributing online political advertising without an imprint ought to be illegal, although I don't believe it is at the moment.
In this case there is a widespread view that the referendum was decided by misinformed voters and activists are trying to intervene on that basis to halt Brexit.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/our-work/roles-and-re...
I have this notion that EU votes are repeated the number of times necessary to have the 'informed' result win.