Aka “More arguments in the comments please”
Note: This is another in an occasional series of speculative ideas about how we might make digital politics work better.
When parties and candidates buy digital ads on Facebook or YouTube, the comments are frequently full of people “debating” their content. The quality of arguments varies.
This engagement with political content provides platforms with signals about users’ interests and preferences, potentially informing which content and advertising they see in future.
Many of us in civil society, journalism and government (and, under some duress, the platforms themselves) also think political ads are worth preserving in transparency archives. The theory is that transparency constrains bad behaviour, through democratic norms and election laws, and allows opposing parties to see what their rivals are doing so they can respond.
The underlying idea is that ad libraries facilitate “counter-speech”. By making political arguments visible, they allow opponents to challenge them and offer alternatives. In theory, this is an unalloyed democratic good, with politics decided through a battle of ideas.
But the way this is delivered seems woefully insufficient, particularly in an era where so much of the content we see has no intermediary journalist or editor to help us contextualise information and decide whether it’s worth believing.
Worse, because of the way ads are presented to users on social media platforms, if you want to respond directly, it’s nearly impossible to find them in the wild. There are too many of them, and they aren’t targeted at you. Essentially, if you want to push back against the content of an opponent’s ad, using the comment feature, you can’t do it unless the message appears directly in your own feed.
So, what can be done?
Rather than attempting the Sisyphean task of independently fact-checking every political ad, we could give parties and candidates the privileged opportunity to respond to ads about them or the elections they’re contesting.
Simply put, they should have an automatic and highly visible right of reply.
For example, if a Republican candidate posts an ad about the policies or character of their Democratic opponent, that opponent gets to reply, and their reply is pinned at the top of the comments or even displayed immediately below. Voters can then debate whatever the issues are in the normal way below, but with important added context.
The point of this facility isn’t to give politicians yet another privilege, but to give voters a better opportunity to hear competing arguments before making up their minds. The principle isn’t new with broadcast regulators having long grappled with fairness and rights of reply in political speech. But so far we’ve done nothing to bring these principles into online advertising.
What about the practicalities?
The immediate question is “who” gets to reply. This isn’t as easy to manage as it sounds. Most formal political debates are extremely structured and rule-bound, and something similar should be true here.
Parties might get to nominate one account to use for their replies. They might be limited in who they can reply to (designated party accounts, rather than individual candidates). They might have to be of a certain size to qualify for the right-to-reply (after all, not every party makes it to the TV debate). They could get the same right-of-reply if they’re mentioned by non-party campaigners (e.g. PACs and third parties) too.
What might the consequences be?
The most foreseeable consequence is an explosion in comments by opposing parties. This could be a good thing.
It could make political advertising more substantive. If your ad makes an argument that’s trivial to rebut, you will probably think twice about posting it. And if you do choose to run it, you’d have to work through how your opponent might fact-check your statements, lay out positive arguments of their own or post that killer joke.
But the right of reply could also be a bad thing, as parties look for ways to lure their rivals into denying things that aren’t true (e.g. LBJ’s “pig fucker” politics).
The targeted ad then, hitherto seen as an unalloyed good from a campaigner’s perspective, suddenly becomes a double-edged sword. Buying an audience for your own argument also buys an audience for your opponent’s response.
There might also be a positive effect on political competition. A party spending £15m or $150m on advertising would, in effect, be helping distribute its opponents’ arguments too. That could modestly narrow the gap between well-funded campaigns and those with fewer resources, while reinforcing the idea that elections should be contests between competing arguments, ultimately settled by voters. Equally, a well-resourced party posting thousands of different ads might be able to overwhelm their poorer counterpart (in the past, we’ve argued that fewer ads would also be a good thing).
When it comes to political speech on the internet, there are always unintended consequences. Systems create incentives. Incentives change behaviour. And the consequences aren’t always predictable. Any proposal like this would need careful design and testing before being rolled out. Campaigners should be invited to wargame the system, looking for ways to exploit it, so the worst unintended consequences can be predicted and designed out.
The right of reply as a new intermediary
We’re all familiar with the rat-a-tat of partisan politics: two politicians across a desk, a journalist between them, each firing back and forth. It’s not perfect, and it can be undignified, but voters hearing both sides and making a judgement based on the conversation is generally a good thing.
The modern information environment isn’t like this. The political communication we see via ads looks much more like a speech or press statement, where the speaker comes out, makes their point, turns on their heel and heads back inside without taking questions.
Who Targets Me has spent nearly a decade trying to make political advertising more transparent. For millions of ads, we can now see who said what, to whom and how much they spent doing it.
The next challenge is trying to make sure that those who are spoken about can answer.