Search for 'tax' finds one instance: > This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides. Sadly this does not contain the obvious fix: tax ads.
By some accounts the Russian fb spend was under $100k ( https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-ad-spend/ ) Assuming election meddling is the thing you want to avoid, even a 50% tax wouldn't take this out of the price range of even the thriftiest of governments.
If true, that would indicate that these ads are dramatically under priced. If it was simply a matter of spending money on facebook, things will balance next election, as the price of those ads will go up dramatically
Of course, the fact that Clinton spent so much more on facebook and still lost the electoral college would indicate that if the facebook ad campaign was decisive, that it's more about how you use it than about what you pay Facebook; I would bet rather a lot that Facebook is spending a lot of effort right now to reverse engineer what the Russians did so they can sell it to their more wealthy clients.