One thing people need to understand is that halting political ads to all political parties is not political neutral, it is siding with the establishment, the party in power.
I'm just trying to understand how it actually helps the party in power by not allowing ads to run. Because I see the opposite situation. Honestly it seems to me both situations the sitting party has the most power, but simply due to the fact that they're the party in power.
Let's say the maximum reach/exposure to voters is 100% in their country. The political establishment of many decades already have this number close to 100%, but the opposition may only have 5%. You see, the opposition has potential to gain a lot from ads, but not the establishment.
Also in a rich society like Singapore, grassroots can make huge contribution to the opposition party if their voice get heard and spread. But the establishment does not need this.
I'd argue the opposing party 5% support would likely have a matching resource pool of their size. Meaning the establishment might run 95% of all ads as ads supporting the establishment and only 5% of ads would support the opposing party. So I struggle to see how that would help the opposing party?
Obviously, it isn't that cut and dry, but America is a good example actually. Because they have 2 major parties and several third parties. But those third parties never make any meaningful growth even after running ads because they only represent >5% of the available political parties.
So agree to disagree then.
I am reminded of Thomas Sowells idea of "Cosmic Justice" which was posted here a few days ago [1]. Giving Google the reins on political advertisement is an impossible game, and the only winning move is not to play.
> In a sense, proponents of "social justice" are unduly modest. What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice.
I am simply pointing out the establishment benefits from Google's policy. Between allowing all political ads and halting all political ads, the Singapore establishment would prefer the second.
> In an election with the media totally dominated by the state, alternative parties would have no ability to educate and inform the voters of Singapore in the run up to the elections if we are not able to use Google’s advertising platforms...
The situation is markedly different from the one in the USA, where the media is not state owned. Therefore banning political advertisement in the USA is politically neutral, whereas banning political advertisement in Singapore obviously aids the incumbent People’s Action Party and is not politically neutral.
If the most dominant media (visible above-the-fold by default on phones, computers, TV) predominately favors a specific political party - then the opposing and third parties will lose the ability to have their say heard via ads.
If it favors incumbents then it is not favoring any particular ideology since the incumbent can be any.
If you want to address the staying power of incumbents, arbitrarily favoring opponents who happen to have the most wealth is not the way to do it. It will just consistently favor political movements that money approves of.
Under this definition, wouldn't it effectively be impossible to be politically neutral?
A more proper example would be your local newspaper, instead of local grocery store.
I personally think that we should be generous in this regard, and always treat inaction (e.g. not distributing political ads) as neutral, but I can't explain why.
Well, if nothing else, time is finite. If I simply read a list of every political or plausible political issue that could affect you, I could easily make it detailed enough to take hours. How much have you donated to cure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rare_diseases ? Don't you care about all of those people? What's your opinion of all the bills currently making their way through your city council? Don't you care enough to make time to find out and have an opinion and take appropriate political action? Every charity in your state or country you're not donating to, well, clearly if you're not for them you're against them.
That attitude just doesn't scale. Inaction shouldn't be read as opposition or lack of concern. We all have a list of thousands of concerns and only enough energy to invest in a couple dozen or so, and we've got other constraints on what those can be too if we're not trust-fund babies.
Well, yes, it is scale-variant. Inaction matters a lot more for powerful groups (like governments or large corporations) that actually could take actions that would meaningfully change outcomes.
Are Google ads that influential as far as 'establishment' vs 'not establishment' in Singapore?