Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter, unleashed a frenzy of commentary when he went Pontius Pilate and effectively washed his hands of the false advertising problem online by announcing his platform would no longer take political ads. But perhaps the most alarming reaction came from Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub, who called on social media giants to “stop the practice of microtargeting” ads on their platforms.
As someone who has worked on multiple state and federal election campaigns, I found such comments from the highest campaign regulatory official in the country counterproductive and anti-democratic. …
Such limits would force campaigns to return to the old strategy of carpet-bombing the airwaves with expensive and annoying TV ads just to talk to the 3 percent to 5 percent of reliable voters who are “persuadable” (read: late-deciding and frequently least informed). This is how TV-heavy campaigns have been run for decades, and research shows it led to a 20-year decline in voter participation pre-microtargeting. CONT.
Chris Wilson (WPA Intelligence), Washington Post