All political ads running on Google in the US | Hacker News Reader

All political ads running on Google in the US

adstransparency.google.com

392 pointscellis334 comments

Interesting to compare the top ads when sorting "Amount spent: high to low" and "Number of times shown: high to low". Political ads from 4 years ago appear to have been shown many more times for much less cost. This year's ads seem considerably more expensive while also reaching a smaller audience.

The politicians are having to bid against Temu this year and by god do they spend a lot on ads.

It's kinda crazy. We are in Germany, so no US ads. But even 8€ eCPM floor still makes temu show up.

The only Temu ad I've ever seen was during the Super Bowl. I'm guessing I'm in the wrong demographic?

I'm talking banner ads. I block almost everything everywhere, except my work. My boss (who doesn't block anything and accepts all tracking everywhere) doesn't get their ads. So I think they just have a scattershot approach.

I guess it's a testament to my daily driver (Brave browser) that I had to Google "what is temu."

Genuinely curious: do you actually include "what is" in your searches, or was that paraphrasing?

Yes, when looking for the definition of an unknown term

with AI powered searches now it’s best to give it the full question instead of trying to use a keyword search

I would, this would hint google's classifier that I want a tl;dr and not temu's website.

Boy do I wish for a governments ban and cultural shift on the mindless resource contention consumerism that makes people buy useless plastic bullshit. Our planet is doomed, we're just lucky the Earth is so big.

Ad impressions were artificially cheap during Covid as people spent more time on their devices. There was such an increase in prices post-Covid that it caused a bust in e-commerce companies. This was also partially caused by Apple privacy changes.

Sounds like Google is making good money on this then

Gold rush shovels

Competition might be part of that too: more money chasing the same number of eyeballs as the election season ramped up (for that matter, probably chasing a smaller number of eyeballs, as critical segments of swing voters became more clear)

Google switched from running an actual auction to making you bid the most they think you're willing to pay.

Inflation is part of that.

Nah, I think this one is just greed.

First of all, the above comment says “part” and that’s incontrovertibly true.

Second of all, by what mechanism is this greed and from whom? You do know this is an auction, right? In that case, are the greedy actors the other auction bidders, trying to also spend more money?

what caused this sudden change in greed? Were these actors not greedy before 2019?

The greed was always there.

The pandemic provided an unprecedentedly easy excuse for implementing that greed.

Covid was a catalyst for bigger changes to go potentially unchallenged and opportunity for extra greed. 1 company dared do a thing and no one batted eye. Then 2nd. Domino's of greed and fake excuse on supposed inflation. But it was just domino's of greed

While rates were low they could offset nickel and diming consumers by handing them cheap cash in the form of inflated wages to work lame jobs. Now rates are high, jobs cut, less consumer nickel and diming as consumers are tapped out

For the time being it’s back to the old way of screwing the public by over charging government for consulting work

boiling the frog slowly. if you start out being more expensive than traditional media, they won't use you.

same thing with streaming. start out cheaper/more convenient/more comprehensive than traditional media - and an enormous market to grow into, so your shareholders are happy even with a reasonable price. wait a few years until you have saturated the market, and now the only way to achieve the holy growth is to raise the prices indefinitely.

https://imgur.com/presenting-recent-findings-by-fucking-magn...

now look at the same plot for Netflix: https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes

can you spot any difference? Look closely!

More targeted, perhaps. “Meh, whoever” has always been cheaper per view than targeted.

I think you're right. I've been comparing these two directly:

2020: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR123656109299...

2024: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR104621681140...

Looks like it's primarily the "location" demographic that is actually different. Neither ad excludes any demographics for Age or Gender but the 2024 includes specific locations for advertisements. So maybe fewer people in Europe and elsewhere seeing American political ads, which I'd assume is preferred by the advertisers. I can see how that would compound to this effect; fewer valuable targets and more value per target.

(Another thing I notice is the ad run length. The 2020 ads ran for a single day (with over 10M views!) and the 2024 ads have been running for weeks or months. Not sure if that's relevant to the expenditure but it's interesting to note.)

In Norway it's forbidden with political ads on TV. Reasoning being that live images can have a huge influence, while also possibly being inflammatory and dumb down the debate. But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.

However, this law hasn't been updated in decades. So it's still only TV ads that's illegal. So it feels like a quite arbitrary restriction now.

Not saying it should be illegal on other media as well, but I do like the idea of it not being the size of your pockets determining the election. I guess that would be hard to police anyways now, with how influencers can sway stuff without it being an "ad", or how algorithms drive you into a rabbit hole of tailored content anyways.

Kind of new in the US, you can't stop people in the US from spending money on ads that amplify there speech. [1]

Political spending is regulated, but we now have "political action committees" that can support candidates but can't coordinate with them. They can accept money from anyone in any amounts. Its brought tons of money from wealthy doners into polics in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Comedey Centrals Colbert Report (Colbert playing a Conservative pundit) once set one a PAC with a political lawyer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colbert_Super_PAC

I'm not a lawyer..

As someone who is "swing state adjacent", and avoiding them mostly this year, I feel for those under the crush of political ads.

PACs can now coordinate with campaigns! What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve spent years blocking them or their source sites wherever they show up. It’s been surprisingly effective over time.

> But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.

I think the main reason for rules like this is because it's literally politicians and political parties shoveling huge amounts of cash to the media, and 1) one of the purposes of the media is to inform people about politicians and politics, and 2) the politicians who are elected will oversee the media and their mergers. An intimate relationship is created where democracy demands an adversarial one.

It's rotten. It's the same reason no media can criticize any drug in the US, since they were allowed to advertise to the public. I'm sure there's some value in having people ask for specific drugs from their doctors, but that's minimal; the main value is being immune to any criticism unless an e.g. television station wants to lose 20% of their income.

Also media outlets are free to propagandize all day. You can't restrict that because we don't want to restrict freedom of the press. But then that begs the question, don't all companies and individuals have the same freedom of the press that media companies do?

This is the most shocking part from an outsider POV. In Europe* mainstream media must obviously be neutral about each candidate but also give the same amount of airing time to each candidate. So like if candidate 1 is invited for a 10 min interview, candidate 2 must be invited too and offered the same airing time. Meanwhile here Fox can just call Harris "stupid" (and CNN reciprocally call Trump whatever they want), lie to make them look good/bad and support their candidate all day long while spitting on the other one, and it's fine.

Edit: my bad for generalizing all countries of Europe

Not in Poland. Before the last election we had 100% partisan media with the public media campaigning for the ruling party and the opposition controling the private media. Both had the Fox News/CNN/Pravda levels of objectivity showing a strange propaganda version of reality.

This is certainly not true for the mainstream media in all of europe. It might be true for public television stations in some countries.

In Spain, public TV must show a list of parties with a minimum same time for even the tiniest craziest parties several times a day. After that, they are free to keep doing their thing.

But the biggest parties can buy more time by several subterfuges. In resume they can pay somehow for receiving a special treatment. Every politician has a market value and TV programs always compete for showing adds to the most eyeballs possible, so they will try to fill their programs with the more popular politicians 'for free'.

If I'm not wrong, private channels, funded without public money, can show people making pancakes all day it they want, but they will also try to maximize their advertising revenues.

How much do they have to be "neutral" when there are multiple candidates with significantly different popularity?

If there are three candidates polling about equal then okay, it's easy to be neutral. But what if they're |40, 35, 25| or |60, 20, 20| or |55, 40, 5|?

When does a minor candidate drop out of their neutrality? I'm not saying the general idea is bad but just pointing out that neutrality is kind of a vague concept. It's a bit like giving climate change deniers equal airtime with serious scientists.

I don't know if I follow you. My point was that TV networks can't do propaganda for a candidate, i.e. they can repeat the policies of each candidate (without giving you their opinion on those policies and trying to convince you if it's good or bad or modify them) and fact check what they say, but they can't tell you who to vote for or blatantly lie about them. Hence they are neutral. Meanwhile here Fox will just tell you to vote for Trump to save America and that if Harris wins she will turn America into communism, and millions of people are watching and believing it.

If that's what the Fox presenters truly believe, should the government be allowed to censor them?

And this is the crux of the issue.

Most countries don’t have the pretense of free speech, and media is heavily regulated to be ‘fair’ (which means different things in each country).

It has pros and cons.

The real reason of course is that the political establishment wanted to protect themselves from competition. They can control printed media within the country, but had no control over broadcast television, which could be beamed from a satellite. Due to the restrictions on press freedom in Scandinavia, commercial TV stations used to be based in the UK. A parliament member in Sweden even suggested a ban on satellite dishes at the time, when the first non-government TV channels started broadcasting.

> But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.

This is not the case. Electoral authorities could oblige all broadcasters to give every candidate a certain number of minutes of broadcast time. That's how they do it in other countries. To hilarious effect sometimes.

How are TV ads any different from MDG posters or the AP ads at bus stops? We allow the latter in Norway and they're not that much cheaper than TV ads.

They're different as in a video can influence you much stronger than a poster. But maybe you misunderstood me, my point was that the way we have it today isn't necessarily good either. Just curious about how one can give people good information, without it being too inflammatory, and without making an election a race about who has the most money.

No, I agree with your remark completely but I'm still ambivalent about the tradeoff.

We agree there should at least be one medium of advertising for political parties. But where do we draw the line?

For instance, I would be happy with making all ads plain text, standard font and size so that the ads won't abuse human attention by showing bright colors, happy images etc.

Reasoning being that live images can have a huge influence

Adding some context here - TBane stations (the subway) in Oslo have posters that show live videos - usually static images with dynamic attention-grabbing effects but sometimes full blown videos too.

The population of all of Norway is substantially less than that of the New York, LA, Chicago, or Houston metro areas.

The scale of these markets or the spending related thereto is not comparable at all.

Could any of these metro areas ban political ads on TV locally?

What is your point?

Comparing what works in one with what works in the other is meaningless at best. The idea that any of these concepts could be generalized between the two is silly.

Ah, scale-ism. ;-)

I can't instinctively imagine how the size of a nation could realistically impact the results of this particular decision (banning political ads). Could you perhaps propose a realistic theory?

Well, there's an enormous amount more money to be made in the United States with political advertising, so you're going to get a great deal more pushback from advertisers on any such attempt /s

:-)

I didn't say it worked, rather I said it kinda doesn't because it's so limited compared to where people get their ads nowadays. It also wasn't really meant as a comparison, more of a segue into a discussion around if the huge ad spending and influencing is good or bad.

Fascinating stuff.

I went down a rabbit hole with this particlar ad: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR132650406472...

It links to a website called fultongrandjury.com, which I at first thought would be an official government website, and what initially made me curious was the idea of spending money to advertise a government website, getting this additional credibility. Like, if the facts are so strongly on your side that you merely need to spend ad money to point people to official sources, that's a strong signal.

> Fulton County Jury is a project of Our Community Media, Small Town American Media, and Small Town Truth.

None of these are linked, but they can be found with Google. Our Community Media appears to be a website with stories scraped from Google News, one even has the Google News default image. Small Town America Media claims to support Small Businesses, Telehealth in Rural America and Digital Literacy. Their latest news: Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws Are Political Theater by State Politicians.

Small Town Truth is probably the most inspiring:

> For over 200 Years

> American has fought for truth

> Now....

> We need you to help

They have page dedicated to "discovering truth", telling it apart from "russian fake news"[1] which is copied from and links to a medium post.

None of these websites have information about who's behind them. No person. No address. They have contact pages, but these are just forms, probably to add you to some spam mailing list.

[1]: https://www.smalltowntruth.org/discover-truth

Small Town Truth says it's a registered 501(c)(3). I just found it by searching here: https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/

It leads to further rabbit holes I don't have the time to dig into now, but I might later, because now I'm very curious where it leads.

Meetings ended and I couldn't wait to get back!

So, searching via that Exempt Organization Search led to a 501(c)(3) letter being issued to Small Town Truth, mailed to a residential address in the care of the "Better Narrative Group" - another "interesting" site[0].

Doing a little more searching, I've found another 501(c)(3) in care of Better Narrative Group: Soul of a Nation Media. Similar setup. In trying to find more information to connect some dots, I found Soul of a Nation Media's taxes were filed by ChurchBiz[1], but this hasn't led to anything interesting.

Both Small Town Truth and Soul of a Nation Media changed addresses to a PO Box in Virginia in 2022.

Oh, and here are another two I just found related to Better Narrative Group: American Volunteer Corps[2], Better Neighbors Network[3].

To not assume malice, maybe it's a concerned citizen trying, in their own way, by establishing these organizations. Something feels off about the sites, though - not much content, a little dead behind the eyes, and I can't put my finger on the actual purpose of the sites. Odd.

[0] https://www.betternarrativegroup.org

[1] https://www.churchbiz.com

[2] https://www.americanvolunteercorps.org/

[3] https://www.betterneighborsnetwork.org/

edit: formatting

Not at my desktop, so I can’t really dig into the technical details of these sites, but by the look of them, they were all made either with the same tool and general components OR they were all made by the same group (maybe the same contracting firm or something)

The images are all hosted on wix, so I guess they're all built with wix (I checked through them all to see if I could track the images back to anything, it's all stock photos)

The weirdest thing I find about everything in there is this hobby lobby page: https://www.smalltowntruth.org/our-economy

Yknow maybe these are just actual us political groups… they have to exist, right?

"Real" legitimate domestic political groups usually have the names of the people running them, with bios, etc. Who founded them, etc.

They try to make it easy to figure out who they are so you trust them.

When that information is missing it's extremely suspicious, and rightly so.

I think that's a pretty obsolete take that hasn't been reliable since Obama '08 and the "digital strategy".

Not saying anything about "should", zealous downvoters...

Why? Do you know something I don’t? Intuitively to me it seems like “unverified identities are usually fake” is the core tenant of post-internet media literacy.

Have you interacted with any political organizations in the last 10 years offline? If/when you interact with them online, do they claim provenance through some actual recognized body or just some vagaries around how they want to depict their alignments?

If this was such a big deal, where is the hubbub about pretty much every email in my inbox?

NGPVan (for instance, on the Dem side) doesn't require much except the bare minimum of legal registration for political organizations, I don't buy that what is essentially a "marketplace for voters' email addresses" suddenly legitimizes anyone who signs up for their service.

My point is, if this is a problem, it has been one for a long time and the cultural zeitgeist seems to have simply ignored this except in cases that can be used to demonize enemies.

I don't understand anything you're talking about.

Nobody likes e-mail spam from anonymous groups. NGPVan has an about page that lists who runs it with photos, they have an office and a phone number, they have a Wikipedia page. But they don't legitimize anyone else, as you seem to be suggesting.

Anonymous interference like this hasn't been a problem for a long time, contrary to your assertion -- it's very specific to this and the past two elections, because it's a tactic especially used by foreign influence like Russia. And this isn't about "demonizing enemies", it's about identifying illegal foreign influence, which is a very real thing.

> Have you interacted with any political organizations in the last 10 years offline?

No, I haven’t. Honestly surprised at myself but post-2014 the answer is straight-up no.

When I interact with them online (or, especially lately, by getting text spam), I assume astroturf until proven otherwise. I’m having trouble coming up with an example of a campaign that has succeeded at proving otherwise.

I don’t know what NGPVan is, would you explain?

Update to this, I’m convinced it’s not.

Idk if it’s Russian or whatever, but I’ve been convinced by other comments that it’s probably not a community run internet group.

> Both Small Town Truth and Soul of a Nation Media changed addresses to a PO Box in Virginia in 2022

What else is at that P.O. box?

Good question. Uncovering some more things here, with a wider web.

Another tax-exempt org was established in 2021 (like the others), named NORTH CAROLINA VOLUNTEER CORPS. This one, though, was established in Asheville, NC. Like the others, it was moved to the same P.O. Box in 2022. It was registered under the care of a different name. Its taxes were also filed by ChurchBiz.

Another entity registered at this address is AMA AL PROMIJO. This has a web presence like the other original sites[0]. It was also registered in 2021 and changed address in 2022 to the P.O. Box, but was registered in care of another different name. The fact that the website has the same feel as those others that branched off Small Town Truth is odd, though.

There is also a BORN BROWN INSTITUTE, which has some different presences on LinkedIn and such[1].

Now that this address appears associated with some different non-profits, I wonder if there’s some entity that acts as an agent for helping establishing non-profits operating out of this P.O. Box, hence the mix of entities I’m now bumping into.

Still. It’s an interesting web here I can’t quite make sense of. I’m also being a little circumspect here in order to not accidentally dox someone, but the research is fairly straightforward with the Exempt Organization Search site and some googling.

[0] https://www.ama-al-projimo.org/

[1] https://www.wjbf.com/business/press-releases/ein-presswire/6...

One more interesting update: AMA AL PROMIJO was established in care of an individual named Eric Sapp. Some googling landed me on an org’s site named Public Democracy. One of the other team members at the company[0] is the person named in care of one of the NORTH CAROLINA VOLUNTEER CORPS.

Seems we have some glue here! Time to learn more about this Public Democracy thing to try to figure out their angle.

[0] https://www.publicdemocracy.io/teammates

Here's the website that has info about the program, and lists AMA AL PROMIJO as a 'partner': https://www.publicdemocracyamerica.org/better-angels-program

All these orgs are taking advantage of the 'Google Grants' program, which provides up to $10,000 per month in free search advertising for registered nonprofits. $120,000/yr in free ads for the cost of registering a nonprofit seems like a no-brainer for spreading a message. Likely drives up ad prices and gives a nice tax-break to Google, so they win too.

https://www.google.com/grants/faq/

So to summarize, someone saw the Google Grants program, figured out how to abuse it and scaled it up. I wouldn't even call this much of a loop hole because it seems so obvious.

How widespread / prevalent is this? Does Google care? Is Google incentivized to not care? Is it such a small drop in the bucket that it's basically irrelevant (and boring)?

I wonder if we'd see the same on other ad platforms like Facebook.

These incentives are incredibly misaligned. How big is this tax loop hole to Google? Truck sized or Battlestar sized?

this is insane and shows how dangerous big tech is, break them up already

headline: Russian disinfo webring busted by HN diligence

Spot on.

> fultongrandjury.com, which I at first thought would be an official government website

Are you being straight serious here, or are you doing a rhetoric thing where "I was confused" is just a shorthand for "I think some people might plausibly be confused"?

I could see some people who aren't net-saavy thinking that domain looks like a government website, but I'm surprised that anybody here might see a .com like that and think it an official anything. Official government websites in America almost always use a .gov, and when they don't they usually have some goofy long string of subdomains like www.courts.state.md.us (I'm not 100% sure that is actually official, but it's in the style government websites use and if an unofficial website used that style I'd definitely consider it an attempt to deceive people.)

usps.com. amtrak.com. mta.info. These were just the first that came to mind.

I think there are specific reasons behind each of these, but the fact is that I am used to interacting with government websites that end in .com, so it wouldn't surprise me if some county's court system also used a .com.

None of those are government websites.

Those are state run businesses, not exactly government agencies.

USPS is a federal government agency tho

https://www.usa.gov/agencies/u-s-postal-service

When I see .com I immediately assume it's not a government site until proven otherwise. It's sometimes done, particularly for affiliated and contracted sites, but also anyone can just go register a .com (see the history of whitehouse.com - from porn to gambling and more) plus government ones overwhelming tend to be .gov, .org, .us, etc anyways. (.gov is really the only one of those that's a particular guarantee of much but the others are at least slightly more likely to be real sites).

It seems to be the work of a man named Scott Shalett. Not sure in what capacity.

https://www.publicdemocracy.io/scottshalett

Looking at that smalltowntruth website reminds me of someone I met in 2015.

I stayed at a guy's airbnb in Denver. He was in breach of his renting agreement by hosting the airbnb and had previously spent about a year in jail (forget for what). He said he had 2 websites that he was promoting on Facebook and were making him money. On one website he posted lots of pro-Trump content and on the other he posted lots of pro-Bernie Sanders content. This was during the primaries so these articles were largely in opposition to Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. He said he didn't care about either candidate but both websites were making him good money in ad revenue. He was not actually affiliated with either party.

I wouldn't be surprised if he or someone else like him had scaled up their efforts.

I find that quite satisfying. At least someone is getting something tangible out of the screaming and shouting, and best of all, it’s something straightforward. Money.

interesting that the company that has the most viewed ads for 2024[1] ("FORCE VECTOR COMMUNICATIONS") has a total of 3 matches when you search for them[2]

[1] https://adstransparency.google.com/political?region=US&topic...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22force+vector+communicatio...

Just shell companies for various PACs and how rich people donate through dark pools.

The Citizens United vs FEC ruling is a sham.

The obscuring seems to be unnecessary these days. I don't know how many people are still fooled by names like "Americans for America" who would actually change their vote after finding out it's just a group of real estate speculators or whatever.

I think it's the other way round. You're a respectable individual, you're buying some low-brow ads - and you don't want a newspaper to publish an expose about you, your employees throwing a hissy-fit, or a neighbor getting upset.

I understand that mentality but it's clearly not how people behave. People who buy into bullshit do so as a core personality behavior. It's like how doomsday cult members double down when the predictions don't come to pass.

I mean https://www.heavensgate.com/ is still around. Being discredited has the opposite effect as the intended. It instead concretizes the delusions. Exposing charlatans seems to only increase the fanaticism of their adherents.

You are thinking of a completely different situation. No one is thinking of some real estate guy who wants the dems or republicans to win as their cult leader when seeing those ads.

At least in the US, political partisanship I think is operationally pretty similar to a cult. It certainly doesn't have to exist like this but right now I think it is which is why I brought up the observation in the first place.

I feel like that's an impression caused by the current political media environment but it's not reality. Voter turnout is less than 50% of voting age population in the US and a significant portion of the voters are independents. Silent majority or whatever.

Those observations are somewhat in agreement. If politics became less culty there might be higher engagement.

Everyone I know who posts about a particular politic or election are totally batshit.

Really the only reaction I have is of concern. Like, are they getting therapy, does their family know...

you seem to have some other motive with these statements but i’ll bite, what’s the solution to a less “cult like” political environment?

should one party move to the other or something else?

I have no idea.

Maybe it's because there's too much sensationalism and story-telling? People realized you get better ratings through theatrical emotionally charged fictions sitting adjacent to reality and they're cheaper to produce than careful and cautious journalism? That's kind of Juvenal's bread and circuses theory.

Maybe it's a natural consequence of the vast diversity of information channels and online communities so not only do classically oppressed groups have homes but also those committed to hate or messianic cults?

Maybe there's some increased isolationism of industrial society so people end up severing the in person community ties that help to keep them better attached to reality?

Maybe it's all of these?

My observation of the current state is Republicans are pining for a dictator, Democrats are trying to be a 2002 era George W Bush knockoff and most people are thinking "what is up with these lousy options?"

It's the problem you see in almost all organizations: when you focus on the fans, you alienate the base by deluding yourself into imagining a phantom majority a few steps away from loving you but which in reality wants nothing to do with you.

You noticed how you labeled the alternative to your choice as a dictator? I did.

The solution is to remove parties and make people think for themselves. But I do agree focusing on the extremists is counterproductive. That’s why I’m an independent, to forcefully remove bias.

You overestimate ad consumers. Think about it, most people don't use adblock.

One of those does point to the underlying organization, "Righters Group" which seems to be a rightwing fundraising group.

Specifically, if you perform a `whois` on email-comply.com, you can find

    Registrant Organization: Force Vector Communications, LLC

and

    Tech Email: accounting@rightersgroup.com

Now you added hackernews :)

Why can't they show the ads that violated policy on the ads transparency page? Seems like part of the transparency would be seeing what they removed.

Now THAT would be extremely interesting.

Kudos to Google. We also need this for all the non-Google outlets.

Here's the equivalent from Meta: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&a...

Here's one from X via CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics/doj-alleges-russia-f...

Looks like you have to supply a search query for the link to work. I just search for the letter "a":

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&a...

They also have an aggregate report page. It doesn't seem possible to break it down by ad category, but looks like the most recent big spenders are all political ads:

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/

This really interesting, but I think they have an odd idea of transparency.

I searched for some ads for a congressional race in 2018, obviously inactive, and they were all there, but I couldn't view them because: "This content was removed because the disclaimer didn’t follow our policy for ads about social issues, elections or politics."

For what conceivable reason would they block historical ads, ads that actually ran in the past but are no longer active? Those ads probably didn't meet the disclaimer rules because the rules were different back in 2018.

Sounds like that defeats much of the purpose. One thing they definitely need to do now is to be certain to retain all that data, for future transparency and historical record.

According to the site, ad targeting is allowed based on gender and age, but not race or religion, for example. All four of those categories were previously used to restrict voting and are now legally protected from voting discrimination.

Why allow targeting some of them but not all? Either all should be disallowed (for the same reason that race, religion, etc are), or all should be allowed (on the reasoning that this is about choosing who to promote your message to, not in any way affecting who can vote or independently search about election issues--which is presumably why age and gender are allowed).

> Why allow targeting some of them but not all? Either all should be disallowed (for the same reason that race, religion, etc are), or all should be allowed

Easy: as already mentioned advertisers love targeting. On the other hand, considering the current sentiment in society allowing gender and age as targeting category causes much less of an outcry (or even shitstorm) than race and religion. So, to balance earning vs risk for reputation damage the first two categories are allowed for advertising targeting while the latter two are not.

Well, targeting works. Really well.

Advertisers love it.

It’s also why it gets banned when it gets used to hurt people too much.

I see the sentiment often from people who want a categorically clear legal system.

The answer is that these choices are often made taking into account real world situations. Not just theory. When different rights come into conflicts, the courts weigh them against each other, and take into account the magnitude of the real world impact.

Ban all for a logical simplicity sounds appealing, but the courts frequently find that this would lead to a greater Injustice then mixed decisions.

Showing untargeted ads to children might be worse than showing them targeted ads.

It's fascinating. I'm at home and my pi-hole ad-blocking rules apparently trigger for that page, so although I can see the titles, all the images just fail to load.

Some filters trigger simply on the word "ads" in the url.

Oh _that's_ what's happening. I was wondering why so many images were broken but I hadn't investigated.

I don’t run a pi hole but use quad9 dns. Getting the same thing

In France we limit campaign budgets to 50M$ (population adjusted) and the state fully reimburses it. US presidential campaigns are 60x more expensive per capita!

Have people in the US proposed such a cap to prevent corporations from buying elections, or is that too foreign of a concept ?

What happens in France if I personally fund a bunch of billboards to advertise for a politician?

While, the campaigns do receive tons of a money there's also a lot of non-campaign expenditure in the way of things called PACs/Super-PACs which basically produce the same ads that you could see from a candidate minus the "and I'm X and I approve this message.".

That was the case until 2010. Controversially, the Supreme Court then found the First Amendment/freedom of speech prevents the federal government from restricting spending by corporations, unions, nonprofits, etc.

I'm curious how France deals with external entities running influence campaigns on global platforms in this context? What prevents external entities (countries or corporations) from effectively buying elections in France?

Which global platforms? I can talk of Canada and every social media network that sell ads in Canada also has an office in the country and must follow laws.

Of course the organic reach can be manipulated, but the influence seems to be still somewhat limited.

Most of the money spent in US political ads is to raise more money. It's hardly corporations buying elections.

It's an election industrial complex, a self-licking ice cream cone! It's amazing how the election season gets longer and longer.

The state fully reimburses the campaign budget to each candidate?

Yes, if you get >=5% of the votes!

Our system isn't perfect though, it's a two-round system that has non-linearities, notably the Condorcet paradox : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox

There is that too but you can't win this way now. Every year on the US tax form you can contribute $3 to publicly financed campaigns.

There have been attempts but when corporations are considered people limitations on their "speech" all eventually fail

I hate this phrasing.

Corporations aren't people.

The finding was that people dont lose their rights when working together via a corporation.

If you can buy a political sign and your friend can buy a sign, then the two of you can buy a sign together.

The issue is then the theoretical contract of the two of you together takes no real repercussion for breaking the law, whereas separately if you committed crimes independently then you could be put in jail. We don’t have capital punishment for corporations, and we should.

How does that argue against people still having rights.

Corporate death penalty exists, it is called bankruptcy. It is called criminal liability and people are put in jail.

You just seem to disagree with how harsh (or not) the penalties are. However, that doesn't say anything about taking away rights.

This largely isn't true. The most effective way to shield yourself from crime is to just be a corporation. It's trivial to kill hundreds, even thousands, if the accountability is spread out against enough people.

Famously Bayer Pharmaceuticals knowingly sold HIV infected products in Africa. How many people got HIV? And how many then passed it on, and then how many of those passed it on? I don't know. I'm guessing the amount of people who died of AIDS is pretty much impossible to quantify. Nobody went to jail. Of course, this is an obvious example. It's not so obvious when you consider the role companies like McDonald's have played in people's deaths.

We even have separate terms for corporations, like fraud. Fraud is really just stealing. If I commit some type of fraud and get 10 million dollars, sure I might be fined. Might. If I steal 10 million dollars as an individual, then I go to prison.

The only time this doesn't happen is if, and only if, there's an individual within a corporation acting alone or calling the shots. This is trivial to avoid. The game of corporate America is really just accountability management. I mean, who do you jail if you don't even know who did it?

Ultimately though, the problem with corporations have direct influences over elections is that they inherently have different incentives than individuals. What's best for our citizens and what's best for Corp X rarely align. In fact, for many industries they're directly contrary! Tobacco thrives off of making people sick and addicted, and sure, that one is obvious. What about automobile manufacturers? Isn't it in their interest to have the most shit public infrastructure possible? And... doesn't that effect poorer Americans the most?

Or what about oil? Isn't it in their interest to make the air and water as poisonous as possible, because they can cut costs that way? And what about fast food? Isn't it in their interest to makes the ingredients and health of their food as difficult to understand as possible? And on and on and on.

Individuals would never advocate any of that, not in a million years. So, the speech isn't the same. IMO, you just can't compare them like that, because the incentives are way different. The majority of companies directly benefit from screwing you over in a plethora of ways. Why should those opinions matter? What good does that do for you or me?

I think you are still taking issue with the severity of penalties, not legal immunity.

Should someone go to jail for HIV deaths in Africa, or heart attacks from McDonalds? I dont think the comparison to individuals is as clear as you make it out to be. We dont charge surgeons

This is beside really besides the point tho when it comes to elections. Corporations are made up of people. If you restrict them, you are also restricting the individuals. Maybe we should- A lot of countries do! I just dont get why people get into all this complex theory about corporate personhood instead of just making that claim. If you dont like corporate donations, are you really OK with Gates or whoever making a $100M donation? do you really think corporate donations are somehow worse?

> We dont charge surgeons

We definitely do if they act in malice. "Do no harm" and all. I guess then it comes down to how stupid you think corporate leadership is.

IMO, most of the time they're not stupid. I don't think Tabacco executives genuinely though getting people hooked on nicotine was fine. Not to mention they did everything they could to make the occurrence of nicotine more potent...

> are you really OK with Gates or whoever making a $100M donation? do you really think corporate donations are somehow worse?

1. I'm not 100% okay with the ultra-wealthy influencing elections, because their interests are also at odds with the average American person (who is who your representatives should serve!), but:

2. I do think it's slightly better than corporations influencing elections. Bill Gates is still a person and probably doesn't advocate things that directly harm humanity. The same is not true for corporations - many of them literally exist solely to harm humanity (and make money in the process).

Democrat, Republican, or Independent, Google gets rich either way. You can clearly see price per view has gone up dramatically from the historical comparison. $2B in Google ad spend so far this cycle.

Also interesting, the New York Times is the most viewed ad of this election season, having been seen 10M+ times.

It appears the only true winners of US presidential election mania are Google and the Media.

In the middle of the 2008 Dem primaries (H. Clinton vs Obama) it was obvious it won't be much of a race anymore, Obama was going to clinch it, but the media narrative was still portraying it as one... it made me wonder how much of it came because if the audience thinks it's a race, then they'll tune in, and more eyeballs = better ad sales.

Ah, Allah bless the everlasting Attention Economy!

NFL is a microcosm of american politics. Two opponent teams, each has a trainer, a rich donor, some ideology and millions of fanatics who vote for their team no matter what. It may seem like the goal is to win the game on the stadium, but behind the scenes it's a well calculated auction of advertisements.

Your first sentence is spot on. Your analysis is dead wrong.

I disagree. The point is kinda spot on. Their end goal is to have their team perform the best possible in order to sell out tickets/stadiums/merch and have high ratings from viewership and syndication.

It's about as American as you can get.

In the age of information warfare, ads are a weapon and Google is the modern day Colt. If you sell guns to the North, the South needs more guns from you. If you sell to the criminals, the cops need more guns from you.

Not sure what this is called but it's definitely not "don't be evil"

The term I heard was fence-setters. It's a little off though, becsuse it implies your allegiance changes. Google allegiance is always clearly on money.

The problem is though that what's best for corporations and what's best for Americans don't align.

If you're McDonald's and your goal is to make money, you're not trying to make the best quality burger. You're trying to get crack legal, so you can lace your burgers with it.

Google will always inherently have a bias towards candidates that push a narrative that helps their profits. This is true of all corporations and is the intrinsic danger of allowing them to influence elections.

Weird that some ads are hidden on that page indicating "policy violations." You'd think in the ads transparency section they would be particularly interested in such ads or at least the reason for their violation for investigative purposes. That seems like a good way to slip controversial things under the rug.

From the insights tab, with a date range of the past year, the state where the second most ad money was spent was California (after Pennsylvania).

California is not even close to being a swing state, afaik?

California is strongly "blue" on the national issues these days, but that doesn't mean that there aren't hotly contested elections and ballot measures at issue within the state.

Seperately, it brings potential as a source of funding to spend elsewhere specifically because some of the national questions aren't really open. If you are confident in the ROI, you can run ads there to drive fundraising -- especially early on -- and then spend those raised funds in contested elections elsewhere.

The same dynamic happens in soundly "red" markets, although that may not be apparent in this dataset because of the specific demographics of Google advertising.

> Seperately, it brings potential as a source of funding to spend elsewhere specifically because some of the national questions aren't really open. If you are confident in the ROI, you can run ads there to drive fundraising -- especially early on -- and then spend those raised funds in contested elections elsewhere.

Exactly. A lot of the ads are fundraising ads, like this one: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR059412260615...

I'm probably going to mail my ballot on Monday. Are there any particular hot button issues in California to look out for?

IMO this year the ballot props are much more meaningful to the average person than usual. The perennial niche prosp about kidney dialysis aren't making a showing for what feels like the first time in a decade.

There are some big proposed changes to how local bond measures work, rent control, and the criminal justice system, IMO those are the ones spending the most time researching and considering the consequences.

As far as the more niche ones this time around, there's the same-sex marriage prop (which I believe is purely symbolic and doesn't have an actual impact on same sex marriage in California) and the prop designed to force the AIDs Healthcare Foundation to spend more money on AIDS healthcare (IIUC currently they spend most of their money on political causes like lobbying against rezoning that would allow denser housing)

> same-sex marriage prop (which I believe is purely symbolic...

Same-sex marriage is currently outlawed by the California constitution as a result of Prop 8 from 2008. That clause is void as a result of the Hollingsworth and Obergefell decisions, but there are multiple members of the Supreme Court who have explicitly said that they would like to overturn Obergefell, so it's a good idea to get ahead of the potential catastrophe by taking the bad law fully off the books, rather than relying on a capricious and extremist court to stick to a rights-defending decision for any amount of time.

Doesn't the Respect for Marriage Act [1] ensure they can't roll back same-sex marriage like they did abortion?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_for_Marriage_Act

> Doesn't the Respect for Marriage Act [1] ensure they can't roll back same-sex marriage like they did abortion?

No. RMA lets states ban gay marriage. It just requires them to honour other states' gay marriages.

Thanks for the clarification. I still wonder if it matters all that much. You only need one state to allow non-residents to marry on Zoom, and it's a non-issue in practical terms.

States banning same-sex marriage within their borders takes away the dignity and respect of same-sex marriages and couples, so it's quite awful. But they can't actively prosecute people for crossing state lines to marry. They have to provide them the same rights as hetero-married couples, even for things like state benefits and taxes.

> there's the same-sex marriage prop (which I believe is purely symbolic and doesn't have an actual impact on same sex marriage in California)

It removes an on-the-books clause that was rendered inoperable by a SCOTUS decision. I think it’s a step above symbolic since any future changes in SCOTUS jurisprudence reversing or partially reversing Obergefell (which I don’t think are at all likely with this court on this issue, but it doesn’t hurt to be prudent) could make it operable again.

I think prop 8 was previously nullified by Hollingsworth v. Perry?

Not saying it'll never matter, but if OP has a finite amount of focus IMO it's better to spend it on laws that will have an immediate impact over ones that require multiple hypotheticals to come into play

> Finite amount of focus.

It revises one statement in the state constitution in a very straightforward way.

It takes an infintessimal amount of focus to decide if you're in favor of that change or not.

Whether the reason it's on this year's ballot is neurotic or strategic is on a level with whether you should buy 4 or 6 rolls of toilet paper next time you're at the store. You already know if you need toilet paper or not, so that difference is relatively inconsequential.

Prop 8 has essentially become a trigger law banning gay marriage, the same as many states pre-Dobbs had trigger laws banning abortion that would become operational as soon as the Supreme Court lifted the national rule against them. While it may viewe by some as unlikely in the near term, thr fact is there is no guarantee kf any warning (much less sufficient earning for signature gathering and an election to repeal it) before such a change would go into effect. Removing the time bomb from the State Constitution is a prudent thing to do if you are at all concerned with the right it would deny.

> I think prop 8 was previously nullified by Hollingsworth v. Perry?

Looks like it. That decision came down around the first time I excised the daily news from my life after spending too many years as a news junkie and before I valued reading court opinions so I missed it.

Re: Focus: Most ballot measures that have ever appeared on the ballot aren’t worth the paper they were printed on, yet they’re still there. Short of eliminating the popular ballot initiative process—something I could get behind—we’re long past the point of asking whether something is “worth” voting on for a reason like that. Someone wanted it on the ballot badly enough to make it happen and by our own laws that’s basically their right, so it’s on the ballot. Just like the mofos who always try to get that dumb kidney dialysis measure passed almost every election cycle.

California has an enormous economy and holding office at any level of government there opens a lot of "doors".

Recent spending in CA (Sep 1-now) looks like it's heavily landlord associations running ads against prop 33, which would allow for new rent controls.

https://adstransparency.google.com/political?region=21137&to...

As a CA voter I find it very awesome that I could look that up so easily.

EDIT: The sort order isn't part of the URL, so you have to sort by Amount spent: high to low -- blew that one Google!

The population of California is so large that even though nationally it is solidly Democratic, there are more Republicans in California than in smaller states that are seen as solidly Republican. This matters in the local and state government elections.

There are a ton of smaller races in California that end up hotly contested. The state has big money on both sides of those smaller races.

> California is not even close to being a swing state, afaik?

As the most populous state, California has a lot of political donors - likely the most registered members in a state for both major parties. 1 in 8 Americans are in California. Those many small-value & high-roller donors help finance the swing state operations, but need to be activated. Donors are why both Republican and Democratic party candidates held events in California, when it's not in play.

California has over 10 million people more than Texas. It’s huge, so absolute number comparisons are often confusing.

As usual, XKCD (can’t find the comic) - https://x.com/xkcd/status/1339348000750104576?lang=en

Sure, but it's a winner-takes-all situation.

(That tweet is excellent.)

> can’t find the comic

The tweet quotes the alt-text of https://xkcd.com/2399/ “2020 Election Map”:

> There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

There are lots of people on the ballot besides Harris and Trump.

Am I reading this wrong or does it seem like the majority of these are for Harris/Democrats?

When one campaign raises 3 times as much money as the other campaign, that tends to happen.

Interesting that money is considered to have a large influence on US elections, one side has a lot more money, and yet the race is incredibly close.

The polling may be close, but we really won't know if the election is close until the final numbers come out.

Money has an influence but it's not decisive. In the 2016 presidential election, the Clinton / Kaine campaign spent about twice as much as their opponents but still lost. Could they have won with even more money? Maybe?

Money is a lot in US politics, but Michael Bloomberg will tell you himself that it isn't everything. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg_2020_preside....

In my view, money might once have, but the number of persuadable voters is quite low. If someone has decided to vote for Trump, it's unlikely they will change their mind. And if someone is undecided, they'll probably vote for Trump, because let's face it, most people voting for Harris aren't voting because they like her platform - they're voting because they dislike Trump. If you don't dislike Trump, Harris's platform is nothing world-changingly new or different.

> most people voting for Harris aren't voting because they like her platform - they're voting because they dislike Trump

That seems to be a popular conclusion by people who are on the Trump side. I see little evidence for it in real life. Many factors go into a political choice, and sure, disliking Trump is one of them, but most Harris supporters would not be voting R in any case because they do not agree with that platform.

Well, I don't like her and her platform is alright compared to trump's, but that just words. Tim Walz is alright tho. I still voted for her. My sample size is definetly biased and small, but that is the sentiment I get from her voters that I know.

True. But if you look at Harris's platform, it's not very ground-breaking, honestly. It's mostly just par for the course. A fair portion of the reason my family is voting for them is because Trump is a danger to democracy. Frankly, I'd barely looked at her platform - I just knew Trump had tried to destroy American democracy, and that is all that matters.

I don't know how many people are genuinely enthused about her platform. Mostly it feels like it's fueled by hating Trump's platform and Trump (which, to be clear, is a valid reason!). I guess I should have been clearer - I meant that they're voting Harris not because her platform is great (honestly it seems about average for Democratic candidates), but because they dislike Trump's platform and Trump himself. They don't really care what Harris is proposing, as long as it's vaguely reasonable.

Yes remember when billionaire money interfering in election campaigns was considered a bad thing?

I suspect that the given the different demographics of the voting population, the republican side probably advertises more on Facebook.

Or day time TV, yeah.

What do you think the demographics are of Google ad viewers vs Harris / Trump potential voters?

But also, yes, the Harris campaign has spent about 2x as much in aggregate: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/elections/kamala-harri...

I'd expect the demographics of google ad viewers to be more or less "the internet at large, minus a few markets like China were Google is much less prevalent, and a few groups techy enough to disproportionately run adblockers"

You’d be amazed. A surprising number of people, particularly older people, do not use the internet as such all that much; they use Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, or YouTube.

I was completely shocked to find out how many people use search in those apps to query open questions rather than 'search the web' via something like Google

At least YouTube is Google...

Heh, interesting, the lords of the Attention Economy is Zuck, Google and TikTok. And Musk, but he's busy burning his kingdom.

> more or less "the internet at large"

Right.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...

Older voters are less likely to use the internet (and those who do use it probably use it less). And there's a small urban/rural divide still.

I bought a Kagi subscription when I discovered that Google was de-indexing Covid podcasts that it didn't like. I doubt that the population who moved on from Google is demographically neutral.

> I doubt that the population who moved on from Google is demographically neutral.

They are however, a relatively small group. I suspect more people have moved to ChatGPT than to Kagi.

If I were in the Trump campaign I'd be targeting Facebook over Google by a fair margin. A lot of older folks live on there.

"Facebook users" or "Google users" are way too broad for a political campaign ad to target. Party A's ad will go to too many of Party B's users and vice versa. They need to be much more carefully targeted to be effective.

The purpose of a political ad is not to convince undecided people to vote for [party]. The number of undecideds is vanishingly small, so there's no ROI there. The purpose of a political ad is to convince people who have already picked a side to actually vote vs not voting. So you need to carefully target your "go vote" message to your own team.

You are reading it right

Keep in mind it is only google. Trump has been developing his comms channels for a decade with a core base composed of people who hate 'the media' in every form. And he has gotten pretty good at using those channels. It's also the case that everyone has heard of him now (you may recall that he was recently The President).

Harris was put into candidacy at the last second and needs to speedrun building a president's worth of goodwill from scratch against a guy who functionally already has it. That means her marketing base is 'the entire country' and you need to hit that as hard as possible as fast as possible, which is expensive.

If anyone is interested in connecting with someone working in this space, please hit me up. We’ve been building tools for political media buyers for the last several years. We draw data from the Google Transparency DB, Meta’s equivalent and other disparate sources to allow campaigns to analyze the spending in greater detail. It has been really interesting from an engineering perspective, but also just to learn more about how this industry operates.

Why in the world is a generic NY Times ad categorized as a political ad?

Good question. These ads don't look political to me:

The New York Times: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR047539896236...

The Economist: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR129237820966...

If certain media is associated with a certain political position then one could consider their advertising to be political?

I'm still amazed these stock images with highlighted text don't send off immediate red flags in everyone's mind that they're being tricked.

Especially ones that have children, veterans, or old people, usually with big frowns or drooping flags. "Don't disappoint this stock image! Vote no on prop blah-blah"

It works. This strategy actually works

> It works. This strategy actually works

It works because, in any context, people are easily persuaded that something that they want to believe is true. Willingly or not, people are often looking for excuses to believe something, not evidence to help determine whether it is true. (Of course, you and I are included in this; believing oneself immune to propaganda is just a way of being more vulnerable to the kind of propaganda targeted at people who pride themselves on this supposed immunity.)

Sure but if I see a mailer or an ad in that format, it's a red flag.

The only way this would work as a propaganda tactic on me is if they reversed that, if say, the "yes on 3" campaign sent out a glossy mailer with a frowning minority wheelchair bound veteran that said "save our seniors. Vote no on 3".

If that subterfuge happened, then I fell for it

Since dark money no longer has to be registered, no only would the "Yes on 3" team send out a "No on 3" flyer, it would have a wrong explanation of what 3 is, and give really bad reasons for voting no, so even if you did read it, you'd still vote yes (a no vote will raise taxes on seniors and veterans and give the money to corporations) and hope voters don't check outside sources.

In the kind of advertisement I'm talking about there is no correlation between the imagery and the policy. You'll have a stock photo of a worried immigrant mother holding a child and the proposition will be about something like rezoning a light industrial area for mixed use.

My universal response is "some bastard is trying to hustle me with stock photos"

I wrote about this 8 years ago https://kristopolous.medium.com/the-voters-are-dumbfucks-her...

I think my thoughts are basically the same today

If the spend figure is right the difference between the money spent in the USA and UK is larger than I expected.

Highest weekly spend in the UK is just under £1M (Dec 2019) while in the US it’s £50M (Oct 2024). That’s 10 times more spending with only 5 times the population.

The UK is poorer than you think. Per-capita GDP is $82k in the US vs $49k in the UK (source: World Bank), which accounts for about two thirds of the gap in ad spend.

Early voting has advantages, one being that once I drop my ballot in the local ballot collection box, I can more easily ignore political ads. It's liberating.

Why couldn't you ignore them in the first place?

Same as when you ignore the whole cringe-comedy festival by not even considering voting. Liberating.

Seems like a general handy site in general as a sort of Google Trends alternative. I know it's not an actual alternative but to pick up on certain trends from advertizers.

The top-spent ad in the last 7 days included no targeting other than "nationwide, 18+." That seems folly, doesn't it? Huge waste?

Wouldn't an essentially untargeted ad be the most expensive to run? Meaning that something like that will always be the top-spent?

Not necessarily. If you bid low, you're effectively picking up "remnant" inventory that no one else was willing to pay to target.

How “expensive” (in the sense of total spend) an ad is is entirely driven by what budget you allow for the order.

But without targeting constraints you will get essentially remnants and are unlikely to reach any of your actual target, e.g. undecided likely voters in swing states

A lot of nationwide ads aren't intended to directly influence voting. Rather they are campaign donation solicitations to get more money to run future ads targeted to undecided voters in swing states. Just about everyone 18+ nationwide could afford to make a small campaign contribution if they care about the outcome.

This is the data Googles (and others’) models are trained on

Extreme biases in data mean extreme biases in inference

Talk about normalized bad behavior.

Ok, now let’s see the breakdown of winred/ActBlue email getting through spam filtering. IOS only capitalizes one of those, so there’s a clue

Title: Please vote!

Views: 8-9k

Total spent: $14-15k

This country is doomed.

i kneel

Political advertising just makes democracy look like a total joke. If you can buy votes by shoving ads in peoples’ faces that’s not a democracy, that’s an oligarchy.

Political advertising emerged within a decade of the birth of the republic. Abraham Lincoln famously had his face plastered everywhere, and his campaign monikers like "Honest Abe" are still in use today.

The real push toward oligarchy, in my opinion, is the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs FEC. The only available remedy at this point is for the American electorate to stop relying on political ads and make a decision on policy alignment alone (like the Founding Fathers did) - this is a totally unrealistic goal in today's polarized environment.

You could even say it started with things like Thomas Paine's pamphlet propaganda.

It seems the problem is we have a system that was born from the printing press and this system simply doesn't work in the age of the internet.

All that really holds it together are these religious sentiments about the inherent good of democracy. Sentiments that have almost nothing to do with lived experience at this point.

It seems to me because of the scaling properties, the internet finds an issue free equilibrium of "vote for me because the other person sucks."

Then it is just a race to get the most views on how much the opponent sucks.

"vote for me because the other person sucks." seems to be indeed the status quo that politicians in all democracies feel.mlst comfortable with. I think we need to add an "execute everyone on the ballot" option so that politicians have to do positive campaign because if their only contribution is making people disgusted with politics altogether, they'd be risking their lives.

A major problem of the US 2 party system is that there really is someone specifically you can point at to villainize. With multiple parties its much harder to say "everyone except us is a villain" (unless you kinda wanna be seen as crazy), in the worst case it's calling out the extremist parties, which still leaves room for many other parties.

This. Something like 5 people are almost entirely funding Trump's slump (hard to call this mess a campaign) towards the White House and for sure they are going to want pay back. This is what oligarchy looks like.

While I am sure we would agree on the dangers posed by certain wealthy donors on both sides, the ruling of Citizen's United allows for something far more insidious - effectively a nullification of regulations set forth in a bipartisan campaign finance reform act eight years earlier (BCRA).

Essentially what we have today is a free-for-all. Any corporation can spend unlimited amounts of money (commonly referred to as "dark money") to influence politics, with virtually no oversight (i.e. FEC reporting requirements). As an individual, my ability to fund political campaigns is limited to thresholds set at the local and federal level, but a billion dollar company like FTX can give millions of dollars to politicians who put forward favorable regulations. Billion dollar AI companies will control potential future regulation in a similar manner. I'm oversimplifying here, and added some helpful links for anyone interested:

- Two Challenges for Campaign Finance Disclosure After Citizens United and Doe v. Reed - https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol19/iss4/8/

- The Death of Non-Resident Contribution Limit Bans and the Birth of the New Small, Swing State - https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol28/iss4/4/

- Why Contribution Limits on a Hybrid PAC’s Independent-Expenditure Arm are Impermissible - https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol25/iss1/10/

> Trump's slump [...] towards the White House

Somehow my mind supplies "slouch" instead, probably because of a poem [0]:

> And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

> Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

> The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Every time I read this poem it nails something.

Incredible sense of tension and dread.

It’s fitting that you would quote Yeats, yet another guy who predicted an apocalypse that never came.

It's a poem by a poet published right "the Great War", so I'm not sure what kind of predictive-standard you're trying to apply here.

More generally, predicting a disaster is sometimes an important step in ensuring it never occurs. Self-negating prophecies can have high utility.

5 people? Last time I was on X, nearly every Silicon Valley/tech billionaire was crooning from the rooftops for Trump.

You could argue it's the native X bias, but these were all the famous billionaires and multimillionaires who are top names in the SV space. All rooting for a Trump win, perhaps anticipating a quick Vance presidency.

A lot talk but only a ~half dozen actually bother to put together 100s of millions where their mouths are about it. I haven't looked this year but usually Bloomberg tops the chart on the blue side.

Entirely possible - I spend as little time as possible thinking about this and am just looking forward to our national nightmare of Trump being a plausible president candidate being over the week after next.

He's a plausible candidate and he's at worst a coin flip to win. Almost a 3-2 favorite based on betting markets.

https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-t...

You mean the betting markets the oligarchs have gamed? :)

Though I will agree with you that he has a coin flip chance of being president, which is totally terrifying. Is that what it felt like to be in Germany with Hitler?

Which is ironic since in 2016 everyone on SV was holding back tears of sadness over Trump getting elected. Oh how the turntables.

I do believe that something like 70% of SV can't stand Trump. You can see that in the insane amount of money Kamala has raised from SV (which probably even dwarfs Trump's XX person oligarch haul).

It is largely the sociopaths at the very very top that are Trump donors.

SV only cares about whoever will help them make more money. Everything else is virtue signaling by champagne socialists pretending to care about current day social issues and the struggles of the lower classes.

Somebody (an SV VC actually) once gave me some advice: Silicon Valley VCs will be all nice to you in front of you but talk shit behind your back. East Coast VCs will outright tell you your product is shit and that you are shit, just like your n-th order ancestors.

It was very good advice.

Of course all of the billionaires are rooting for Trump, because they want to be in business next year. Harris will understand voting for other parties, but Trump punishes disloyalty.

> 5 people? Last time I was on X, nearly every Silicon Valley/tech billionaire was crooning from the rooftops for Trump.

From what I heard Bezos interfered with Washington Post for (one of?) the first time to make them not post on endorsing a candidate for president (first time in 36 years).

What the actual reason behind it is is unsure, but they say they wanna "return to their roots". I honestly doubt it and expect its more political interest like to not be on Trumps "land in prison because radical marxist leftist" since he didn't do anything like this in the previous years.

Germany doesn't have negative ads criticizing opponents (at least it didn't have them when I lived there). This makes them refreshingly boring. I would guess at least 90% of the US ads are basically "the other guy is bad. Be afraid" without much content. Getting rid of the negative ads would help a lot.

You might find this interesting!

"The Impact of Negative Political Advertisement on Voter Behaviour in Germany – an Experiment"

https://www.kas.de/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=f8324712...

"Negative campaigning has been a feature of German political campaigns from the very beginning of the Federal Republic... the central idea of this paper is to examine the considerable difference between negative campaigning in Germany compared with that in the US."

It seems like you're correct that German political ads are almost never US-style 'attack ads' because among Germans, "negative campaigning in Germany is much more risky for the attacker than the impact it may have on the attacked party"

Sounds like their system isn't in the later stages of cancer like the US.

I think part of the reason why attack style ads don't work is because you usually need to choose some "villain", which just isn't feasable with more than 2 parties since voters will still have other options than you. Well, unless you vilify every party except your own but that kinda makes your party look crazy.

The closest I can think of is somewhat vilifying the extreme ends of the political spectrum since most parties can agree on that (assuming you have more than like 5 parties).

Every since election cycle started I've been bombarded by two kinds of text messages (local election):

- Don't vote for that guy he is a pedo

- Don't listen to this, he isn't a pedo, and also endorsed by local police department

Political advertising is just the tip of the corruption iceberg. When lobbying and gerrymandering is legal, can you really claim you're living in a democracy?

> When lobbying and gerrymandering is legal

Have you ever given money to the EFF? They're lobbyists. Call your represenatative? That's lobbying. Lobbying, i.e. constituents talking to electeds, is fundamental to democracy.

A huge industrial corporation spending millions on lobbyists in order to make it easier to dump pollutants into the environment without consequence, increasing their profits at the expense of local populations, is also a form of lobbying. I would bet that amoral corporate lobbying accounts for far more activity than good mission driven orgs like the EFF.

> huge industrial corporation spending millions on lobbyists in order to make it easier to dump pollutants into the environment without consequence, increasing their profits at the expense of local populations, is also a form of lobbying

Yes. You're describing a policy disagreement between a polluter and everyone else. Pick any political system and you'll have the same divide. (Again, lobbying involves hiring someone to present the case to an elected. It's categorically distinct from giving to a PAC or campaign.)

> would bet that amoral corporate lobbying accounts for far more activity than good mission driven orgs like the EFF

I mean sure, for a given value of "good." Social policy lobbying tends to vastly outstrip commercial lobbying, in part because the latter is more focussed.

Gerrymandering isn't legal. The Constitution says that the states shall have a republican form of government. The founders intended this to mean an elective republic. If the government chooses its own electors, then it's not a republic by any wild stretch of the imagination.

Yeah, we have the whole package right now. Grift on top of grift where trust and accountability wither rapidly.

The alternative to buying ads is buying newspapers and other media outlets.

Bezos simply told one of the leading newspapers what to do. Musk buys votes. Oligarchy is about to become reality, and it's powered by useful idiots.

its been reality...

Musk pays people to sign a petition, which is legal.

So legal that he stopped after being warned by the feds.

Who says he stopped? I can't find that in the news, and the offer is still up at:

https://petition.theamericapac.org/

Even the Biden DOJ only warned him that it "might be illegal". They're stretching the law, trying to apply a law against paying people to register to vote, but Elon will pay people who are already registered so that's quite a stretch.

Widely reported today.

Well there is no way to ban political messaging in-practice, so we have to regulate it. Also, imo, making education accessible to the masses is important for combating the effectiveness of straight-up misinformation. Right now a good chunk of the population doesn't even seem to understand why they believe things generally, so there's plenty room to improve.

Yet when another country does it? "You're meddling in the election!".

Mhmm, okay.

I tend to agree. I was thinking last night that all elections should be write-in only. You want to vote for someone to fill an office, you have to write their name. This would change the entire system because you wouldn't be able to vote party in ten seconds flat. The propaganda and parties and grift are so cemented in that making party-line voting difficult seems like a logical first step. Ranked choice wouldn't hurt either.

Yeah, freedom of speech is a joke.

The concept of freedom of speech does not imply a free platform to spread your speech.

I think the movie The Insider expressed it well: "The press is free, for anyone that owns one."

Apparently that comes from an older expression dating back at least to a 1960 quote in The New Yorker: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

Circenses et panem

I'm confused how that applies to political ads.

There is a perspective from which all politics is just entertainment with audience participation, while The Powers That Be control the things that actually matter.

(I'm not saying I endorse this view, I'm just trying to explain)

t. Kooky conspiracy theory collector

Well anyone can buy ads so it's not really an oligarchy.

What alternative would you propose for candidates to get they're name out?

Equal time on national television, by law. Like they do in France for example.

So replace oligopoly with gerontocracy? Who consumes national television?

Then enforce equal slots per online platform and forbid targeting by demographic cohort.

Fortunately our government can't force private entities to sponsor specific political candidates, due to our constitutional right to freedom of speech.

I'm genuinely curious how this works. What constitutes a platform?

Is TikTok a platform? Reddit? HN?

Why don't you make a proposal for what you think is the best approach?

Honestly it doesn't work that well. Far-rights channels will push left-wing candidates to graveyard slots, or put them against 3 trained "interviewers", etc.

Maybe it's still better than in the US? It's far from perfect.

In Spain at least, radio and TV time slots for political ads are assigned by the Electoral Commission in a session which can be attended by representatives of each candidacy.

As in state sponsored television? No one is watching CSPAN to learn anything about candidates.

Yes, that's the problem. American media is a sewer which tends inexorably toward the lowest common denominator, with dismal effects on its polity.

They might if that's the only way to see political debates and such.

How about advertising anything other than a product or service is illegal? No more campaign ads, period. You want to know more about a candidate? Go research her yourself!

Ah yes, I'm extremely glad that both myself and Charles Koch have the equal right to buy ads. I see no problems that could ever occur because we're equally legally allowed to spend unlimited money on political advertising.

Now... How many ads will 5 bucks buy? I'm pretty deeply in debt, but I could probably skip a meal in order to fully exercise my political freedom.

anyone can buy ads but who buys the majority of ads and ads with the greatest overall impact and impression? That is very obviously skewed. Campaigns directly have limitations on these things, PACs however, do not.

and to your question there, one example is to look at Japan. They give candidates an allotted minimum amount of time on TV for free. A candidate gets platformed purely by running. Not only that but we already do grass roots calling/texting/door-knocking campaigns... it is all definitely possible, but unlikely given that the current organization of elections heavily favors the entrenched two party system and the structures that back them (corporations, PACs, private interests, party structures etc...)

When our entire system requires billions to run and win an election, we are guaranteeing ourselves that we will continue to live in an Oligarchy.

> and to your question there, one example is to look at Japan. They give candidates an allotted minimum amount of time on TV for free. A candidate gets platformed purely by running.

I would be willing to try it in one of our laboratories-of-democracy, but my expectation is that a lot of people would run just for the free opportunity to self-promote. "Hi my name is Ron Popeil and I'm running for city council. I firmly believe that every homeowner deserves, nay, needs a Ronco food dehydrator!"

I don't know about Japan but in France at least there is some minimum threshold to prevent totally unserious random people from running. For example when I lived in France during the 2007 presidential election you needed 500 elected officials (mayors etc.) to vouch that you are a serious candidate. This threshold meant that there were 12 official candidates, unlike the hundreds in US elections, but those 12 were treated equally.

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