No, not at all. Freedom of expression is the right to say your piece to willing listeners. It's a guarantee the state won't interfere in most speech, not a guarantee that rich people can buy an audience.
Cellphones and internet connections are content-neutral pipes that convey content between a willing listener/reader and a speaker they select. So paying for those is a very different case than buying ads, and especially buying false ads.
Especially now that we're 25+ years into the web era, I don't think there's a strong argument for the legal necessity of paid political advertising at all. If I'm curious about candidate or an issue, I can find out anything I want from anybody who can use two thumbs to type something into a box on Facebook or Twitter. I can also get vetted content from a variety of aggregators, from commercial media to non-profit election guides to Wikipedia-style references to my friends sharing things on social media.
Given that, a law saying, "Nobody can pay for reach," certainly wouldn't harm democracy any. And it might help. So I think this is a great step forward on Twitter's part.
There’s no such thing as “legal necessity” to allow something. Our law is based on what is not allowed, instead of what is allowed. There’s an increasing drive towards banning more things and that’s fine if they are warranted, but I hope that we never get to the point where there are a set of action that we are _allowed_ to do.
Sure, but did you really not understand what I meant?
We outlaw things when a) they cause sufficient harm, and b) don't have sufficient countervailing utility. E.g., kitchen knives remain legal even though people are murdered with them, but you aren't allowed to buy a tactical nuke. I'm saying that whatever previous necessity drove us to allow political advertising despite the historically obvious harms, the Internet makes that much, much smaller.
Cellphones and internet connections are content-neutral pipes that convey content between a willing listener/reader and a speaker they select. So paying for those is a very different case than buying ads, and especially buying false ads.
Especially now that we're 25+ years into the web era, I don't think there's a strong argument for the legal necessity of paid political advertising at all. If I'm curious about candidate or an issue, I can find out anything I want from anybody who can use two thumbs to type something into a box on Facebook or Twitter. I can also get vetted content from a variety of aggregators, from commercial media to non-profit election guides to Wikipedia-style references to my friends sharing things on social media.
Given that, a law saying, "Nobody can pay for reach," certainly wouldn't harm democracy any. And it might help. So I think this is a great step forward on Twitter's part.