Hacker News Reader

Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

> Political advertising should be banned entirely in my opinion.

How can society change for the better if you can't communicate and try to convince people of your ideas in the public space? If you see a problem and think you have a (political) solution, you should be able to advertize your solution.

There is a de-facto ban on political advertizing (or "worldview" advertizing) in Germany, and it is really frustrating. The army can run ads looking for recruits, but you cannot run an ad for a peace campaign. There are ads for cigarettes, soft drinks, and alcohol, but most places won't let you run an ad to advocate, lets say, better healthcare.

Basically, this just helps cement the political status quo.

View on HN

Advertising allows relatively cheap, very low effort, access to mass manipulation of a population.

If people had to actually effort to share knowledge - as we evolved to having to do, to excel at story telling to pass on knowledge through generations - then that cost would prevent the kind of rapid indoctrination and rallying people based on hate, emotional and irrational thinking - thought that hasn't been checked with critical thinking.

Process of indoctrination can only exist when fear is constantly present, suppressed-repressed reaction - emotional or otherwise - when ego mind guard is constantly active; Ekhart Tolle in The Power of Now references this and the insanity that this leads to.

This. All ads present a very one sided story, for products this is fine as you would need to pay for it, hence the negative consideration. For a political opinion it’s just there to influence and appeal to inherent bias in the direction of the ad.

It's one reason I love the spirit of Tesla and Elon Musk: Tesla doesn't advertise. This means only once a product is good enough that it starts getting talked about, word of mouth - and that is the perfect mechanism, counterpoint, for a company to only gain attention when deserved vs. paying for it; the VC-finance industrial complex of course has allowed products, organizations, to bypass this most important mechanism of friction for "knowledge" propagation via pumping out select advertising messages, and only in last decade via highly targeted ads - allowing relative precision.

The convergence of these different factors in the last decade, including automation taking away jobs from Americans who want to work - along with regulatory capture that has allow bad policy and ability to pay $0 in taxes like Amazon - leading to societal unrest, increased suffering, allowing for a democracy that can be easily destabilized.

We see this now though - so we can steer the ship, leading to America once again becoming strong - an economic powerhouse, recapturing and rerealizing the rhetoric of American patriotism. Once these systems rebound with new guidance, the innovation of free minds directing resources efficiently toward health - toward being free and standing strong for our brothers and sisters, local and global - will lead to an unstoppable force - which hopefully will not require conflict to hold or expand the line of peace as different nations choose to adopt these systems for themselves - with our support and guidance.

> including automation taking away jobs from Americans

What about the explicit intentional policy?

> along with regulatory capture that has allow bad policy and ability to pay $0 in taxes like Amazon

Don't you mean the lack of?

Not sure what you're referencing re: explicit intentional policy?

Re: Bad policy - certainly there is policy that was crafted to benefit industry at the cost of society, the environment, surely lacking good policy. Like why is VAT in existence in ~160 countries around the world but not in the US? Do you consider that lacking of policy? That's more regulatory capture leading to politicians being elected who protect the interests of those who helped pay to get them voted in.

I'm talking about NAFTA and other trade deals like it. You referenced automation as taking jobs from Americans, when in reality trade deals arguably had much more of a role in doing that. I misread the second point, but I'm not sure what VAT has to do with anything here.

Why are you arguing one or the other? Why not both being a problem?

> How can society change for the better if you can't communicate and try to convince people of your ideas in the public space? If you see a problem and think you have a (political) solution, you should be able to advertize your solution.

It increase impact of money. Who have more money more likely to win.

What if we require that every $1 spent by someone on a political ad must also be balanced by a $1 subsidy for the opponents' ads? Seems fair to me and would reduce the impact of money. (I'm sorry but I forgot who proposed this idea.)

What about systems that are not strictly with two sides?

I'm not convinced, but there's a possible setup: a fund. Entities donate to the fund, and then the money would be distributed among the candidates (either equally, among a smaller number of qualifying candidates, or for all candidates, proportional to e.g. a party's representatives in the legislative branch)

(This would do nothing about money buying influence — as long as the donors are known, their wishes would be carried out by at least the major parties)

Politicians have more than one opponent (except in USA I guess...)

Okay, but wouldn't you consider an ad campaign "political" if it was about voting that oil refineries can't dump run off into a water supply? Would that mean that the same folks running the anti-dumping, environmentally friendly campaign also have to donate money to the oil companies for their pro-dumping initiatives?

I'm not trying to be mean, just pointing out an unintended consequence of such a system.

How do you determine the ‘opponent’? If I want to argue against racism which racists do you give the money to? Just any racist in the street? Some organised racist group? Which one? What if my obvious opponent denies they’re racist are they still entitled to the money?

In Germany Political parties get reimbursed for expenses based on how many votes they received. This reduces the dependence upon corporate gifts.

I understand the practicality of that. But it sets up an expected-value loop, where a dark horse candidate can expect very little reimbursement. Which limits how much campaigning they can do. So they get few votes.

> How can society change for the better if you can't communicate and try to convince people of your ideas in the public space?

There is a difference between marketing and advertising thats not being recognised.

Marketing is the process of promoting an idea or group, not advertising.

Advertising is one of the channels used in marketing, it's the most expensive and reaches the most people, it's the ideal channel for propaganda.

If you banned political marketing then yes you would effectively ban promoting political ideals all together.

However if you ban political advertising you can effectively limit propaganda with little to no negative side effects to grass roots political movements. This is because grass roots politics use other marketing channels and don't have the budget to be able to compete with the propaganda budget of a foreign government.

Even if grass roots did have the money to advertise other channels like social and word of mouth are more effective for them, banning political advertising would still work in their favour.

The thing is such a ban ammounts to a subcontractor ban - those who own them may still advertise. It is less fungible but still a propaganda channel and made more exclusive as parties need to buy the whole hog instead of the ribs metaphorically.

Foreign governments funding grassroots and "grassroots" is an old trick to the Cold War as well from both sides.

Write articles, books, participate in debates, write letters to newspapers, columns, speak at Speakers’ Corner. But don’t buy advertising.

In America you get a voter packet with detailed information on the Candidate's position on key issues, plans, etc. To me this is far superior to a 30s ad clip produced by some marketing agency that specializes in being hip for college students.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com