Less poltical information from fewer sources equals incumbent protection. This is a regression for democracy and an advance for oligarchy.
Whereas traditional ad agencies and TV networks require orders of magnitude more spend to get started. Those are the placements you need oligarchs friends for.
We've just seen how the US's approach to politics has worked out. I'm perfectly happy with not reproducing this.
Power is a zero sum game. Banning adverts and paid media strengthens the influence of organic media like journalists, social media and podcasters.
In the US context, that might've strengthened the Trump campaign's position relative to Harris - given the higher follower counts and podcast views.
> grants every candidate equal visibility as specific times and places.
The UK does something like this with free ad segments on linear TV at election times for major parties. However, the effectiveness has decreased with falling TV viewership.
However, there should definitely be exemptions, as political information basically just means anything that matters. I feel that ads must have a clear intention to inform, not sell, when it comes to politics.
I feel like paid, targeted ads on platforms everyone uses are extremely insidous, because an incumbent or major political party will always have more funds than an e.g. an upstart party, and targeting is generally bad as it's easy to play into people's preconceived notions that way, instead of presenting your position or the change you advocate for.
Edit: replaced "incumbent" with "incumebt or major political party"
You typically only need a few thousand well placed votes to win an election, and even 100k impressions at $10 CPM is pretty inexpensive.
In the context of the EU this isn't true though, no political system in any EU member state relies on a tiny minority of votes from some states/provinces to completely tip an election.
For example the run off thresholds in French legislative elections. And some places like Italy still use FPTP in a hybrid form.
However you're correct that there's nothing quite like Pennsylvania in the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_French_legislative_electi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Italian_general_election#...
Based on the political ads I've seen over the years, people are better off hearing from non-paid sources.
The less noise there's for this kind of bullshit, the better. I'm really happy that every place I've lived so far doesn't have more sources of noise during elections.
I learn about the people running from different sources, journalism where I live still has some modicum of journalism and not entertainment news like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. even though they have clear biases it's quite well understood where their biases sit at, and even the most biased publications here are not overtly partisan so even when they don't align with my political views it's still interesting to read and consider the whole spectrum of opinions without those clearly pushing a distorted reality.
I really do not understand how ads are even considered as any part of the solution, at all. I'm not attacking what you said but just want to clarify it's a very alien view to my own, ads are inherently untrustworthy, they are paid, they don't suffer public scrutiny.
I rely much more on interviews of candidates, publications pro and against them (including the ones I align with that's how I decided to not vote for a candidate and pushing for another candidate of the same party a couple elections ago), and read through their policies in their official platforms.
I don't know any place where journalism is unbiased. Not saying it doesn't exist, maybe it does in some high trust society but it's definitely very rare. USA has it easy because there are only 2 parties and both have partisan media behind them. In parliamentary system with many parties though there is a problem of small ones not being heard. Ads are one solution to that. Social media/Internet in general is another. Incumbents have huge advantage in those systems because of media control, connections to journalists etc.
I agree with your latter points, not with the first one. Ads are noisy, they are not bound to be truthful and there's no pushback during an ad in case it states something obviously misleading or false.
> I don't know any place where journalism is unbiased.
I have specifically mentioned that all journalism is biased on my previous comment, I don't know how you missed it. Still if the bias is well known and the journalists are acting as journalists even under their own bias it won't be extremely partisan such as it is in the USA with Fox News and similar networks (CNN, MSNBC, etc.), given that they aren't overtly partisan I can still hold some trust even towards media that don't align with my political views because I know they are still working as journalists and not partisan hacks.
> In parliamentary system with many parties though there is a problem of small ones not being heard. Ads are one solution to that. Social media/Internet in general is another. Incumbents have huge advantage in those systems because of media control, connections to journalists etc.
There's still ample opportunity for many small parties to deliver their messages since it's well regulated, they might have access to public funding and have a more leveled playing field where money is not a barrier to entry. Ads cost money, so in an ad-infested political landscape smaller parties with little funding have even less opportunities to spread their messaging.
Again, I believe you are too coloured by your limited experience with elections, ads are a noise infested hellscape of information and shouldn't be a large part of the political discourse.