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Comment by theuri | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum - it's really inspiring to see a company take a stand against political advertising, if it can't be properly vetted. One more step to strengthen our democracy.

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The contrarian view is that banning political advertising favors incumbents in elections.

The incumbents are already known. Challengers have to make themselves known, and paid advertising is one of the main ways that is possible.

Incumbents usually have a lot more money to spend on advertising though too. On average I doubt advertising helps challengers more than incumbents (there are always edge cases of course).

The research shows - contrary to common wisdom - that money only helps a campaign until it's reached all reachable voters with their message. After that, more spending does not matter.

It's true that (A) the candidate with the most money (B) usually wins, but that doesn't mean A causes B. It's more likely that the most popular candidate attracts both the most money and the most votes, simply by being more popular.

Money can create popularity.

It comes down to incrementality. Sure Trump has way more money than most challengers, but most people have also already made up their minds about him. His cost to acquire incremental voters is probably much higher than a lesser-known challenger.

Even if he’s not getting incremental votes he can dominate the share of voice by pricing out the competitors.

I would expect that to require an extremely huge amount of money and be impractical.

Candidates + parties + PACs + lobbying + think tanks + advocacy organizations spent $10B in 2018 in the US, whereas the US almond industry made $12B in 2018. So I expect political spending to not be able to change ad prices very much compared to commercial ad spending.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

Yeah I very much doubt Trump is wasting his money bidding on impressions for people likely to support Democrats (assuming he can accurately mimic the dems’ targeting) just to slightly raise the cost of Democratic campaigns

This is what I'm thinking. Like an advertising carpet bomb that drowns out dissent and sows confusion.

As someone who lived through Meg Whitmans's carpet bombing when trying to win the California governorship over Jerry Brown, it's hard to believe that would matter.

For me, it just made me annoyed at Whitman.

A quick googling gave this¹ doc, that says MW spent $178.5M against $36.7M from JB. Brown won easily.

¹ https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...

This is very much the part of the political spectrum I'm on.

I have a hard time buying into that contrarian view in a post-Cambridge Analytica world. If anything, it feels like whataboutism to me. While Twitter is trying to deal with the mass corruption of democracy around the world from micro-targeted lies, they want to talk about some kid's high school student president campaign.

I, likewise, feel it's a massive red herring

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