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One thing that I would like to see is full transparency of advertising. There's no (good) reason that I know of for keeping the details of political advertising secret. I would like to be able to go to a central website that lists in detail how much advertising money a specific campaign spent, where, on what.
That's what Facebook has already done. You can go and check out the content/spending for past political Facebook ads (since the feature was introduced).
It could be better: everything in one place, more policing/fines for people trying to 'bend the rules', etc.
JonoMarshall-
Oh I see, I wasn't aware of that! That's good of course, though it'd be nicer if that was enforced on a country level with mandatory reporting by the campaigns. Rather than us having to hope more social media follows the Facebook 'example', and then having to scrape the data from all kinds of different sources to get a better overall picture...
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Except it's only in certain places, and only where the group spending identify themselves as being political. (AFAIK anyhow).
In some ways I find the voter suppression adverts more disturbing. everyone should be driving for higher turnout at elections. I'd rather people went and spoilt their ballots deliberately than didn't vote. Those spoilt ballots are noted, not voting isn't.
I'd love to do something like the Tactical 2017 combined with the Democracy Club stuff that also allows you to easily produce flyers with a map for where the polling station for the area is, and a list of the addresses covered by it, that you could take to a printers to get printed up for you. But I'm not sure that I can code it.
I think I'd also need to look at what you need to do legally around that too, ensuring that spending reporting etc. gets done, but I think that should be codeable too.
I'd love for a central site that pulled all advertising for elections into once place, so that you could drill down to an area and see what has been sent to where, or what has been put up on what bill boards etc, but that seems rather unrealistic somehow, maybe you could pull an amount of it together with crowdsourcing now?
SwissChap
MrDrem
Oh yes for sure, the chain letters were more an example for something that should in theory be clearly identifiable as sketchy at best, and yet so many people not only believe them, but do their part in sharing it themselves. If they fail at that hurdle already, how well-prepared are they going to be to deal with the targeted ads you mention?
And I fully agree with what you say with regards to wilfully spreading disinformation, and the disparity in spending power by campaigns. The whole matter is complicated by the fine-tuned targeting capabilities that you now have through social media - is it just the natural 'next step' in advertising that has now reached political advertising, or is it going too far?
One thing that I would like to see is full transparency of advertising. There's no (good) reason that I know of for keeping the details of political advertising secret. I would like to be able to go to a central website that lists in detail how much advertising money a specific campaign spent, where, on what. In itself, that wouldn't solve anything of course, but at least it would take a lot of the guesswork out.
@Eejit
I suppose the easiest way out of this is to claim I was merely joking too, and call it a day.