Political advertising on Google

Why doesn't google/fb (other than money) just ban ads from non-political campaigns.. i.e. Pacs, etc.. if you're Bernie Sanders you can run an ad, if you're a super pac or political agency you cannot run campaigns for a politician, only the verified politician and designated politician workers can access adwords/fb ads for that campaign.

This would essentially help make citizens united null/void at least so far as social media/search engine ad buys are considered...

Their policies are fascinating:

Take this one in not allowing certain kinds of inappropriate content:

" Content that harasses, intimidates, or bullies an individual or group of individuals

Example: Content that singles out someone for abuse or harassment; content that suggests a tragic event did not happen, or that victims or their families are actors, or complicit in a cover-up of the event."

Do other networks have similar policies?

Axios has good summary of what this is: https://www.axios.com/google-releases-political-ad-directory... - It mentions an API to access this information. I don't want to paste the Axios text because their entire article is pretty short, and I would feel bad about them not getting fair compensation for this kind of short, succinct journalism that I would like to see in the world.

"Must be approved by Google"

What prevents Google from shutting out legitimate campaigns that aren't racist or hateful, but doesn't align with how Google sees the future of the USA?

Many of the video ads are "no longer available" for viewing (e.g. OneNation [0]) and I see no information about target selectors that they used. Is Google not releasing this selectors or were the ads not targeted?

EDIT: Ok, you have to select a specific campaign to see the targets. Unfortunately I can't see where to go from the non-specific-campaign-filter video I select to the campaign it was on. Also there is campaign ambiguity since they are identified by date ranges...ideally a better presentation should be done.

A general FAQ can be found at [1]. Note how it doesn't include political ads that don't mention a federal candidate so, e.g. ads similar to the recent brexit ad disclosures would not even appear here if they happened domestically. Similarly, gubernatorial ads would also not appear. I can understand that what is and isn't a political ad when its about an issue and not a candidate is hard to determine (especially w/out FEC ID), but we have to assume the ads are at least viewed and categorized internally before deployed and it is at that point it would be reasonable to mark them.

0 - https://transparencyreport.google.com/political-ads/library/...

1 - https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/9052272

The budgets are smaller than I thought they'd be over a 2-3 month period. Also, not surprisingly, a lot of these ads are really, really badly done. Misspelled words, bad contrast of text color to background, just unprofessional.

Clicking any advertiser name shows "There was an error loading content." for me.

I’ve been thinking about a crowdsourced superpac. Anyone can create an ad and then donated money funds its distribution on Google and Facebook ad networks. Kind of like digital picketing. Does anything like this exist already?

I find it interesting that it's translated to Swedish but is only about the US. Are they using Google translate behind the scenes perhaps?

This is a step in the right direction. I like the top targeted keywords, but would be even better to see which ads and organizations bought the keywords. Is Trump or Beto spending more on people searching for aclu?