Twitter to ban political advertising

He controls it all

My opinion is that many apathetic people become that way because of being treated unfairly (in their view) or feeling helpless, and way less people become that way because of thinking too hard.

"Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars ..."

Well, I see new data: lobbying $$$ that could make a previously trusted politician biased. Time to update my simplistic model on his related political ads to being less likely to true. There might be another politician who changed positions based on new or emerging body of evidence - maybe this person is more trustworthy this time. New data -> updated evaluation.

"the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth"

I'm not familiar with post-modernism or Stoicism. But I sure hope that the proportion of people who believe one thing does not ultimately determine its truthfulness. The way I would initially simplify this is to rely on the likely proportion of unbiased people who hold one position versus the opposite. And by unbiased, I simplify that by not trusting greedy people, or people who have not studied the policy or history of it or other places who've tried different approaches. I think these initial simplifications will already cut down many viewpoints and voices that I do not need hear, in order to make an informed voting decision.

Here’s a hypothetical to illustrate how this makes sense in my view: the incumbent is always going to control the lions share of the so called free media. Two or three elections cycles ago, the average campaign didn’t know about a/b testing much less how to leverage social to level the playing field. Now everyone knows... now the incumbent no longer has the home field advantage... except.. twitter just changed the rules. One less platform that the challenger can leverage to play up to the incumbent. And let’s see, everyone thinks Jack is great so maybe some of the other platforms follow on... now technology is basically useless for the challenger.. so we are back to the old system where the incumbent takes the free media attention. A return to the status quo. Now why would social media have an interest in that? Oh I don’t know why does anyone have an interest in seeing entrenched politicians staying in power and yet that’s the system we’ve made for ourselves... oh I know pac money / citizens united are all code for republican money so I’m sure a lot of the commentators on here are thinking this will suppress that because that is the “only people who buy political ads” these days... but I’d ask you this - what if some challenger out there might have a chance of flipping a red state and changing the composition of the senate in 2020... except now one of the tools they could have used just disappeared... how do you feel now? Maybe political ads aren’t so bad if they keep incumbents from sticking around so long.

This is certainly more expensive for them, more uncertain, and more likely to blow up in their faces if someone is determined to have been paid. Certainly it may also reduce attainable reach.

It's difficult to see how this will play out even though the alternative strategy is obvious. Hopefully the people will chalk some advantage.

EDIT: As others have noted, corporations, which are inherently right wing, will still be able to promote their messaging, so there is some disadvantage to the left. Marketing pay-day loans? That's a right wing exploitative program for example.