> This lets journalists and the public fact-check them before they're blasted to a targeted group.
I believe this proposal to be worse than the current state of affairs. I would not delegate censorship of what I may read or watch to a non-elected political body, and doubly so to one which skews >90% to one political party.
> Another option is FEC, or some other independent body, overseeing political ads.
Once again, I do not understand this rational! I assume you do not like how one party in particular is acting, but you would delegate that very same party the power to oversee the censors over all online electoral ads?
> I would not delegate censorship of what I may read or watch to a non-elected political body
Who said anything about censorship?
What I proposed has two parts. One, when a political ad is bought, it must wait a certain amount of time (I propose a week) before being displayed. Two, immediately on being bought, it must be made publicly accessible in a permanent database.
The latter lets anyone fact check the ad. They DON'T get to take down the ad. But the public gets time to evaluate it before it's blasted to users. This deters micro-targeting groups with misinformation. It also creates a public record of what a campaign has said to whom, for contemporaneous and later reference by the public.
A lot of people got triggered by the term "journalist." I'm using that term broadly, to include anyone from a hobbyist with a blog to the mass media. I fundamentally disagree with censoring political speech, even lies. But the current system is unworkable. We need heightened and broadened disclosures for micro-targeted ads.
> But the public gets time to evaluate it before it's blasted to users.
I believe I understand the implied difference between sequestering a video somewhere where it can be evaluated by the public and simply "blasting it to users" alongside content they are consuming, but I wonder if sequestering videos in this way would have the effect you think it will have. It's a system that would reward highly provocative videos with the potential to immediately go viral regardless of their intrinsic merit or truthfulness.
> A lot of people got triggered by the term "journalist."
Right. The issue with the system you're describing is, entirely too many people will react to an online story from the NY Times pointing out a dozen untruthful things about the latest, newly introduced and sequestered angry political ad from whoever by delighting in the distress caused by the lies in the ad, joking about how the libs have been owned, passing links around to the video, and generally spreading falsehoods about the critiques of the ad and the people doing the critiqing. If the whole trolling effort is successful then it will become a meta-story about stupidity and falsehood among the people who aren't dumb enough to believe whatever is being asserted in the ad, but the one thing that will not happen is everyone joining together to condemn the falsehoods in the ad.
> I'm using that term broadly, to include anyone from a hobbyist with a blog to the mass media.
Right, and as nice and democratizing as that can be, the practical effect is often to legitimize bullshitters and put them on the same level as serious people. I am afraid in the example above that is part of how these ads would go viral.
Or maybe it's not all that bad. I guess I hope not. I do think your idea is interesting.
I am not at all sure it would deter misleading ads, since the truth or falsehood of a given claim or set of claims does not necessarily matter much to a chunk of the population. I am pretty sure the mechanism the OP described might reward especially outrageous ads designed to break out of the cage and go viral, in the manner I described.
I believe this proposal to be worse than the current state of affairs. I would not delegate censorship of what I may read or watch to a non-elected political body, and doubly so to one which skews >90% to one political party.
> Another option is FEC, or some other independent body, overseeing political ads.
Once again, I do not understand this rational! I assume you do not like how one party in particular is acting, but you would delegate that very same party the power to oversee the censors over all online electoral ads?