The political ads conversation continues -- Tech Crunch
posted an article about the Trump Campaigns purchase of YouTube’s masthead, the
space at the very top of the video sharing site’s homepage. This ad space can
cost up to 1 million dollars per day…
This isn’t the first time a presidential campaign has employed
this tactic. The Obama campaign purchased the same space on YouTube before Mitt
Romney won the nomination. During that time, however, tech companies could at
least believably claim their sites were secure, and that political ads were regulated
and somewhat controlled.
The 2016 election proved that is not the case. In fact, in
Hillary Clinton’s book, What Happened, she wrote about her defeat and
she had an sections of the book devoted to describing how the role of false
political ads, targeting and the role of bots on Facebook threatened the
underpinnings of American democracy. She finished the book by underscoring the
need for regulation and accountability in the interest of protecting American
democracy.
While tech laws remain largely fluid, determined by the tech
companies themselves (Twitter occasionally removes some campaign ads), tech companies
remain the largest and most effective platform for conveying messages about a
candidate. As the second most popular website globally, (overtaking Facebook in
2018), YouTube remains like its tech giant brothers: unregulated, untethered apolitical
force to be reckoned with.
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