The Nixon presidency brought the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, which the Supreme Court partially struck down in Buckley v. Bush presidency brought the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, also known as McCain-Feingold, after the senators who sponsored it.
And the Trump presidency seems to be on the verge of bringing us some kind of federal government crackdown on political speech on social media.
This, then, is the context in which to view the attempt by members of Congress, Democratic presidential candidates, and even the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to portray advertising on Facebook as an unprecedented threat to American democracy, and to saddle the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, with the responsibility of making sure that no American is swayed by a false political advertisement.
If Facebook had followed Twitter's example and banned political ads, Warren would have had to find some other way to get her message out.
More broadly, the way to deal with misleading political speech is not with prior restraint but by answering it with more accurate speech.
That approach respects voters as smart enough to sort these things out, rather than infantilizing them as easily deceived.
In The New York Times over the weekend, a professor at the University of Virginia, Siva Vaidyanathan, called on Congress to outlaw the delivery of targeted advertising.
A New York Times poll of six swing states shows the progressive candidates faring worse against President Trump than comparatively moderate Joe Biden.
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