All political ads running on Google in the US

The politicians are having to bid against Temu this year and by god do they spend a lot on ads.

Ad impressions were artificially cheap during Covid as people spent more time on their devices. There was such an increase in prices post-Covid that it caused a bust in e-commerce companies. This was also partially caused by Apple privacy changes.

Sounds like Google is making good money on this then

Competition might be part of that too: more money chasing the same number of eyeballs as the election season ramped up (for that matter, probably chasing a smaller number of eyeballs, as critical segments of swing voters became more clear)

Google switched from running an actual auction to making you bid the most they think you're willing to pay.

Inflation is part of that.

More targeted, perhaps. “Meh, whoever” has always been cheaper per view than targeted.

Kind of new in the US, you can't stop people in the US from spending money on ads that amplify there speech. [1]

Political spending is regulated, but we now have "political action committees" that can support candidates but can't coordinate with them. They can accept money from anyone in any amounts. Its brought tons of money from wealthy doners into polics in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Comedey Centrals Colbert Report (Colbert playing a Conservative pundit) once set one a PAC with a political lawyer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colbert_Super_PAC

I'm not a lawyer..

As someone who is "swing state adjacent", and avoiding them mostly this year, I feel for those under the crush of political ads.

> But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.

I think the main reason for rules like this is because it's literally politicians and political parties shoveling huge amounts of cash to the media, and 1) one of the purposes of the media is to inform people about politicians and politics, and 2) the politicians who are elected will oversee the media and their mergers. An intimate relationship is created where democracy demands an adversarial one.

It's rotten. It's the same reason no media can criticize any drug in the US, since they were allowed to advertise to the public. I'm sure there's some value in having people ask for specific drugs from their doctors, but that's minimal; the main value is being immune to any criticism unless an e.g. television station wants to lose 20% of their income.

Also media outlets are free to propagandize all day. You can't restrict that because we don't want to restrict freedom of the press. But then that begs the question, don't all companies and individuals have the same freedom of the press that media companies do?

The real reason of course is that the political establishment wanted to protect themselves from competition. They can control printed media within the country, but had no control over broadcast television, which could be beamed from a satellite. Due to the restrictions on press freedom in Scandinavia, commercial TV stations used to be based in the UK. A parliament member in Sweden even suggested a ban on satellite dishes at the time, when the first non-government TV channels started broadcasting.

> But main reason mainly is that it would give those with enough money to afford these "expensive tv ads" a leg up.

This is not the case. Electoral authorities could oblige all broadcasters to give every candidate a certain number of minutes of broadcast time. That's how they do it in other countries. To hilarious effect sometimes.

How are TV ads any different from MDG posters or the AP ads at bus stops? We allow the latter in Norway and they're not that much cheaper than TV ads.

The population of all of Norway is substantially less than that of the New York, LA, Chicago, or Houston metro areas.

The scale of these markets or the spending related thereto is not comparable at all.

Small Town Truth says it's a registered 501(c)(3). I just found it by searching here: https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/

It leads to further rabbit holes I don't have the time to dig into now, but I might later, because now I'm very curious where it leads.

> fultongrandjury.com, which I at first thought would be an official government website

Are you being straight serious here, or are you doing a rhetoric thing where "I was confused" is just a shorthand for "I think some people might plausibly be confused"?

I could see some people who aren't net-saavy thinking that domain looks like a government website, but I'm surprised that anybody here might see a .com like that and think it an official anything. Official government websites in America almost always use a .gov, and when they don't they usually have some goofy long string of subdomains like www.courts.state.md.us (I'm not 100% sure that is actually official, but it's in the style government websites use and if an unofficial website used that style I'd definitely consider it an attempt to deceive people.)

When I see .com I immediately assume it's not a government site until proven otherwise. It's sometimes done, particularly for affiliated and contracted sites, but also anyone can just go register a .com (see the history of whitehouse.com - from porn to gambling and more) plus government ones overwhelming tend to be .gov, .org, .us, etc anyways. (.gov is really the only one of those that's a particular guarantee of much but the others are at least slightly more likely to be real sites).

It seems to be the work of a man named Scott Shalett. Not sure in what capacity.

https://www.publicdemocracy.io/scottshalett

Looking at that smalltowntruth website reminds me of someone I met in 2015.

I stayed at a guy's airbnb in Denver. He was in breach of his renting agreement by hosting the airbnb and had previously spent about a year in jail (forget for what). He said he had 2 websites that he was promoting on Facebook and were making him money. On one website he posted lots of pro-Trump content and on the other he posted lots of pro-Bernie Sanders content. This was during the primaries so these articles were largely in opposition to Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. He said he didn't care about either candidate but both websites were making him good money in ad revenue. He was not actually affiliated with either party.

I wouldn't be surprised if he or someone else like him had scaled up their efforts.

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Just shell companies for various PACs and how rich people donate through dark pools.

The Citizens United vs FEC ruling is a sham.

One of those does point to the underlying organization, "Righters Group" which seems to be a rightwing fundraising group.

Specifically, if you perform a `whois` on email-comply.com, you can find

    Registrant Organization: Force Vector Communications, LLC

    Tech Email: accounting@rightersgroup.com

Now you added hackernews :)

Now THAT would be extremely interesting.

Here's the equivalent from Meta: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&a...

> Why allow targeting some of them but not all? Either all should be disallowed (for the same reason that race, religion, etc are), or all should be allowed

Easy: as already mentioned advertisers love targeting. On the other hand, considering the current sentiment in society allowing gender and age as targeting category causes much less of an outcry (or even shitstorm) than race and religion. So, to balance earning vs risk for reputation damage the first two categories are allowed for advertising targeting while the latter two are not.

Well, targeting works. Really well.

Advertisers love it.

It’s also why it gets banned when it gets used to hurt people too much.

I see the sentiment often from people who want a categorically clear legal system.

The answer is that these choices are often made taking into account real world situations. Not just theory. When different rights come into conflicts, the courts weigh them against each other, and take into account the magnitude of the real world impact.

Ban all for a logical simplicity sounds appealing, but the courts frequently find that this would lead to a greater Injustice then mixed decisions.

Showing untargeted ads to children might be worse than showing them targeted ads.

Some filters trigger simply on the word "ads" in the url.

Oh _that's_ what's happening. I was wondering why so many images were broken but I hadn't investigated.

I don’t run a pi hole but use quad9 dns. Getting the same thing

What happens in France if I personally fund a bunch of billboards to advertise for a politician?

While, the campaigns do receive tons of a money there's also a lot of non-campaign expenditure in the way of things called PACs/Super-PACs which basically produce the same ads that you could see from a candidate minus the "and I'm X and I approve this message.".

That was the case until 2010. Controversially, the Supreme Court then found the First Amendment/freedom of speech prevents the federal government from restricting spending by corporations, unions, nonprofits, etc.

I'm curious how France deals with external entities running influence campaigns on global platforms in this context? What prevents external entities (countries or corporations) from effectively buying elections in France?

Most of the money spent in US political ads is to raise more money. It's hardly corporations buying elections.

The state fully reimburses the campaign budget to each candidate?

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There have been attempts but when corporations are considered people limitations on their "speech" all eventually fail

In the middle of the 2008 Dem primaries (H. Clinton vs Obama) it was obvious it won't be much of a race anymore, Obama was going to clinch it, but the media narrative was still portraying it as one... it made me wonder how much of it came because if the audience thinks it's a race, then they'll tune in, and more eyeballs = better ad sales.

Ah, Allah bless the everlasting Attention Economy!

NFL is a microcosm of american politics. Two opponent teams, each has a trainer, a rich donor, some ideology and millions of fanatics who vote for their team no matter what. It may seem like the goal is to win the game on the stadium, but behind the scenes it's a well calculated auction of advertisements.

In the age of information warfare, ads are a weapon and Google is the modern day Colt. If you sell guns to the North, the South needs more guns from you. If you sell to the criminals, the cops need more guns from you.

Not sure what this is called but it's definitely not "don't be evil"

California is strongly "blue" on the national issues these days, but that doesn't mean that there aren't hotly contested elections and ballot measures at issue within the state.

Seperately, it brings potential as a source of funding to spend elsewhere specifically because some of the national questions aren't really open. If you are confident in the ROI, you can run ads there to drive fundraising -- especially early on -- and then spend those raised funds in contested elections elsewhere.

The same dynamic happens in soundly "red" markets, although that may not be apparent in this dataset because of the specific demographics of Google advertising.

California has an enormous economy and holding office at any level of government there opens a lot of "doors".

Recent spending in CA (Sep 1-now) looks like it's heavily landlord associations running ads against prop 33, which would allow for new rent controls.

https://adstransparency.google.com/political?region=21137&to...

As a CA voter I find it very awesome that I could look that up so easily.

EDIT: The sort order isn't part of the URL, so you have to sort by Amount spent: high to low -- blew that one Google!

The population of California is so large that even though nationally it is solidly Democratic, there are more Republicans in California than in smaller states that are seen as solidly Republican. This matters in the local and state government elections.

There are a ton of smaller races in California that end up hotly contested. The state has big money on both sides of those smaller races.

> California is not even close to being a swing state, afaik?

As the most populous state, California has a lot of political donors - likely the most registered members in a state for both major parties. 1 in 8 Americans are in California. Those many small-value & high-roller donors help finance the swing state operations, but need to be activated. Donors are why both Republican and Democratic party candidates held events in California, when it's not in play.

California has over 10 million people more than Texas. It’s huge, so absolute number comparisons are often confusing.

As usual, XKCD (can’t find the comic) - https://x.com/xkcd/status/1339348000750104576?lang=en

There are lots of people on the ballot besides Harris and Trump.