My old coworkers had a story about this. Back in 2012 the romney campaign was spending so much money on facebook ads they couldn't be served fast enough. Coworker was told to turn off the "don't show me ads like this again" functionality for Romney so they could get more views. I don't have numbers, but it's hard to fathom how difficult it would be to literally run out of people to advertise to at facebooks scale.
We are talking about a campaign spending almost $20 billion a month, admittedly Facebook ads would only be a part of that, but why is it unrealistic that they ran out of ad spots to buy?
I could see $20 million a month, but billion doesn't work here since the Romney campaign didn't spend even one billion[0].
Is this one of those weird "billion means something different in my country" things? Because even then, the miscommunication is usually between billion (10^9 in most English) and trillion (10^12), in short scale[1].
This is but one example of one PAC for one party. I don’t know how many PACs exist, but easily hundreds. Thousands? A lot of money is donated to campaigns and PACs across local, state, and national elections, and a lot of that money is spent on advertising of some form, and a lot of that (as the article describes) has been shifted to digital. I would call it a lot a lot.
It once again makes me wonder what they want to do with all that money. Meta is one of the most powerful companies. They get all this money to sell some of that money.
What really is the end game here? The whole point of money or power would be to use it to do something you care about? What use is money and power for the sake of itself? Why have it if all you want is more of it?
At least some rich people seem to want to do something with their riches and power. Which makes the rest of them even more of an enigma.
I wonder if Meta ever ran its own political ads, without a specific candidate paying for them. That might be one reason to obscure the advertiser. (I mean, they _definitely_ did this with generic "get out and vote" advertising, but of course that's not overtly favoring one candidate or the other.)
Depends if it’s geographically targeted to favor your choice political candidate. Say only run get out the vote for people that are likely to vote for candidate A over B
Zuckerberg has so much money, it would be cheaper and less risky to just pay somebody to pay somebody to pay somebody to fund a PAC with offshore accounts with hidden ownership.
We need an Ammendment to provide a common media/site for all candidates, with caps on outside advertising, even for PACs etc. The spending is so wasteful. If they care so much about the problems they're campaigning on, they could use the money to work on fixing them.
> We need an Ammendment to provide a common media/site for all candidates, with caps on outside advertising, even for PACs
The fact that this isn't already the case is so weird. Probably due to the age of the constitution and legal system, its deification and the generic allergy to any evolution on that front.
Campaign regulations, including fairness in representation and budget limits are necessary for a healthy democracy, otherwise it's too susceptible to influence by rich people.
For instance, in Bulgaria that's taken to a somewhat extreme point - party/coalition lists running for election (it's a parliamentary democracy) get a fixed budget from the country if they fit the requirements (enough candidates, enough signatures) with a maximum allowance for donations and own funds to be used. Ads can't be just an attack on a rival, and have to include disclaimers who they're for, who they're paid for, and that buying and selling votes is a crime (an issue in Bulgarian elections, sadly). The system isn't perfect but IMHO it'd be far worse without those protections.
My hope would be that we have an intelligent society that can easily see through the mistakes. There are so many mistakes and half truths on the news that it's almost not worth following. I view everything they say with some level of skepticism.
I do not think it is about that. Chan-Zuckerberg initiative donated about half
a billion to finance elections infrastructure in 2020. It may be about power but certainly not about money
For a company whose bread & butter is “outrage” I would imagine political ads of the type you’re likely to see on Facebook in 2022 are like having someone else do your work for you. And they get paid for the privilege to boot!
