People keep seeing "regulate" and reading it as "ban".
The UK regulates what you can advertise (no prescription pharma, for example) and extremely limits political advertising and spending. This results in a culture where local volunteers are important and you don't get weird lie-based adverts smearing candidates all the time. (The smearing is done for free by the press instead)
The only point at which I would say this was overreach was the period when Gerry Adams MP was banned from speaking on televion and had to have his words read by an actor.
WRT Facebook, a good start would be to guarantee traceability of ads, plus the ability to see all ads run by a particular entity even if they're not targeted at you.
Well, technically we do things like ban outright lying in advertising already, but it's called regulation. Usually when people talk about "bans" they mean blanket bans for an entire industry, like, banning guns, banning fast food, banning drones, etc.
The part about ad campaign transparency was good though. Corporate facebook page data doesn't seem accessible at all. Is there an API for this data that I don't know about??
The UK regulates what you can advertise (no prescription pharma, for example) and extremely limits political advertising and spending. This results in a culture where local volunteers are important and you don't get weird lie-based adverts smearing candidates all the time. (The smearing is done for free by the press instead)
The only point at which I would say this was overreach was the period when Gerry Adams MP was banned from speaking on televion and had to have his words read by an actor.
WRT Facebook, a good start would be to guarantee traceability of ads, plus the ability to see all ads run by a particular entity even if they're not targeted at you.