[repolfx]

As to the touted ineffectiveness of political advertising, the arguments would ring far truer if 1) the parties claiming such reflected the belief in their actions and 2) would not protest so loudly efforts to either curtail or 3) clearly identify those doing the advertising and spending.

1) This is the case, isn't it. In America the Republicans were far more relaxed about the ruling allowing unlimited US campaign money, then spent around half the amount the Democrats did and won.

If they were really being duplicitous about it you'd have seen major freakouts amongst Trump supporters about his very low levels of spending, but I don't remember much of that. You saw far more angst amongst Democrats about the "free" news coverage he got by virtue of saying popular-but-unpopular things.

I'm not saying people are totally consistent on this, but at least in the last election, Trump's behaviour appears to have matched the overall right wing pattern of not really believing political spending is a big deal. The US needs a pretty high baseline of political ad spend just to communicate "there's an election on day X, vote for candidate Y" to 350+ million people in a very short space of time. Beyond that it doesn't seem to matter.

2) Why shouldn't they protest? It's perfectly possible to both believe that government control over speech is bad on principle, and also that political advertising isn't as powerful as your opponents believe.

3) Why should people doing political ad spending be forced to be identified, but people posting political views on the internet not be? A good reason to not force identification of such people is to stop retaliatory attacks by extremists designed to silence people, a very real problem. This is especially important in elections where there's a risk whoever comes to power will try to get revenge on people who supported their opponents. Not normally a risk in US politics because of the First Amendment but it's been seen elsewhere.