Yes, but ads with no reach effectively means you have no meaningful voice in the public discourse. So it's free speech, but without any teeth.
Effort can take the form of standing on the street holding a sign, and it takes money to make a sign, and time to stand there.
It can take the form of going door to door and talking to people and giving them printed materials. You need the money for the printed materials, and the time to canvass the neighborhood.
Same for running for local political office.
Same for making a documentary, or a podcast, or a YouTube channel.
Same for running a Facebook ad.
Communication takes time and money. Getting money also takes time, to earn it, to inherit it, to ask donors or investors for it...
There’s no way to have any communication at all without these elements.
Those with money can pay someone to tell someone else something.
Those with time can tell everyone they meet.
That's how a democracy. Some have bigger voices compared to others.
Zuck himself, ironically, has helped create that situation by deliberately reducing organic reach to force people to pay to be heard.
This is a cynical ploy for money on Zuck's/Facebook's part. If they really cared about free speech, they wouldn't hobble the organic reach of political actors.
If I'm able to have more signs or youtube channels people will pay more attention to me and thus I'm using an advantage the other party may not have the financial ability to respond to.
I think this idea could go further but it seems obvious that money is another unbiased tool to promote your speech. Money doesn't have a political affiliation. People can use money in a biased way just like they can use a camera, tv channel, or sign to have a bias. The medium isn't biased the way it's used is.
Especially when we already live in a massively unequal stage where a few coorporations have access to the most popular websites, magazines, newpapers, tv channels, allowing money into this equation as an unbiased tool will only increase this inequality in the ability to spread a message.
I think we as a society should make changes so that money has as little influence as possible. Of course, that battle will never end and there will be pushback from the small minority of people of have the overwhelming amount of wealth in this world, but changes such as banning political ads in twitter is a very good start.
Removing money has been tried in places like Russia. People stop working and if they are forced will not try as hard.
Money has been part since the beginning. To vote you needed to own property which made sense because land owners paid the government in the form of taxes. Personal income taxes came after the war to pay for the war debts.
By the way every time there's an unrestrained hyper exponential curve, it leads to civil unrest pretty quickly. A lot of terrible things come in the wake of economic hardship.
Similarly, if we decide that inequality in terms of being able to politically influence people is bad, and money exacerbates that inequality, then we can ban political ads. And if something else comes along that does the same thing, ban that too in a way that makes sense.
Having such a small number of people wield such huge political influence is a shame, but what is even worse is when people accept that as inevitable and perpetuates that myth.
My post was just talking about eliminating inequality. I make no claim about reducing inequality.