I'm also fairly surprised that such crap is still happening. I think I remember details about one time that it happened, it was in the context of a video where some US dude tries all kinds of flammable liquids as fuel in a combustion engine. It was like YouTube decided "Oh, redneck content! That guy is gonna love himself some right-wing cringe shit."

No, YouTube. That guy doesn't like it and that guy doesn't like YouTube serving divisive garbage to others.

I think it's more like my google profile is completely hosed lol.

Not sure about the EU-27, but the UK has rules about election ads, to the extent that Cambridge Analytica was a scandal. Some of that scandal was due to bribery and offering prostitutes, but even the aspects that were purely what is considered "normal" for targeting online advertising was unacceptable by UK political standards.

That said, part of the latter being scandalous assumes that they were actually capable of providing the service they claimed, which is something I find myself increasingly unable to believe due to how wildly badly I get categorised by the main advertising platforms — nationality, country of residence, language, gender, all wrong.

I don't know what various countries' norms are, but if people aren't used to political ads and are generally suspicious of the concept, an ad may have negative utility.

I know if I saw a paid ad for a candidate that would make me want to vote against them.

It is more to limit a foreign entity's grasp on controlling the mindset of their citizens. You can compare the feeds of teens in China vs the US on TikTok

> what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place?

To provide tools that counter pressures toward tyranny.

> If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place?

The phrasing here suggests some principle that outweighs societal good.

Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting tools skillfully. Informing voters in other ways yields other outcomes.

Yeah it seems like just another misguided attempt at fixing some issue by the EU. The principal is nice, but the effects and implementation is garbage.

Yes, usually you have to vote against some of your own interests because no candidate lines up perfectly with your interests.

When people talk about voters voting against their own interests I don't think they usually mean voters who know what each candidate's policies would do for their issues and vote for the candidate who will give them the best overall outcome given that all of the candidates would go against some of their interests.

I think they are usually talking about the voters who don't actually know what a candidate's policies would do for their issues because they have been bombarded with misleading or outright lying ads from other candidates or from PACs or other organizations.

For example in a US Senate race here a couple of years ago I saw a lot of ads from the non-incumbent all focusing on problems of the largest city in the state. The thing is none of these problems had anything to do with the incumbent Senator, nor were they problems that the challenger would be able to do anything about if they won. If the challenger wanted to actually address those problems she should have been running for mayor or city council.

I've met several people who voted for that challenger because they wanted those city issues addressed. They knew she should be bad for other issues they cared about. So they thought they were compromising by giving up those other issues to get a better result on the city issues they cared about.

But since the challenger would not have been able to do anything about those issues but would be able to do harm for the issues they cared about they ended up voting for a candidate that was not better than the incumbent on any issue they cared about and was worse on several.

That's ridiculous. We also need minimum asset thresholds for at least 3 generations. What good is a PhD in the hands of someone without a pedigree.

Did you forget a "/s" or is that your genuine belief / political stance?

Some phds are also impressionable; some of them are even religious, so then I think we should just not vote at all and decide randomly. Will it make much difference?

/s -- why is this a thing now?

Designing a voting system that requires an informed objective voter is hard but not impossible.

It would be fun to run a test system in parallel. Try different thing in different locations with each election. (results discarded)

Say, if you want a person to go places and do several things. Surely if you don't pay them for the work you don't get to complaint about quality?

Voting for issues as well or in stead of candidates seems needed. We now have a process to hire an employee. Letting the new hire (temp) figure out how to is pretty silly. They should know what we want. (and get fired if they refuse) Adjusting salary to performance (by popular vote) also seems good.

Lots of bad ideas we can try without doing much harm.

edit:

I forgot, as developers we should attempt to solve the puzzle in code. Voting on things is not new terrain but there remains lots to explore.

Acknowledging the deliberate rampant misinformation campaigns doesn't make you an elitist.

Or, you have a sensible system which bans political ads on TV / print / etc, and grants every candidate equal visibility as specific times and places.

We've just seen how the US's approach to politics has worked out. I'm perfectly happy with not reproducing this.

> 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.

Of course I need mechanisms to hear criticisms, political ads like the ones in the USA are definitely not that, that's what I said.

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.

If you need psychological manipulation (ads) to "fix misinformation" then there is a good chance it isn't misinformation in the first place.

The fact you have to go out of your way to find this supposed "right wing conspiracy nonsense" should be a good indicator of your own bias.

I wonder if you had the same opinion of being prepared with cars and guns if you lived in ukraine or gaza