There& #39;s a big difference between selling food and saying stuff in a campaign.

Generally, the old way was if a politician lied in an ad, the media called them out and that retort became a devastating attack on the person who lied.

The system sort of policed itself.

Media 1/ https://twitter.com/Porter_Anderson/status/1302632831219380229">https://twitter.com/Porter_An...

growing weaker AND refusing to explicitly call out bullshit because of fear of being yelled at by conservatives has diminished this system, but it& #39;s still in force in many ways. Trump is a very weird aberration.

The problem is one of divining intent on the lies part. 2/

How do you show someone is lying and who is the arbiter? That& #39;s really hard for the publishers of advertising to suss out. Also, free speech through the right to campaign is the most sacrosanct protection the government should offer. Better to allow a few liars to get 3/

elected to than to empower some kind of government entity to stifle deserving messages.

All that said, I do think we need better incentives to punish the liars. The media desperately needs to be counterbalanced from its profit motive in the news business because that leads 4/

sensationalizing crowding out truth. Voters care about and want the truth and that void needs some kind of government relation to bolster it. Whether it& #39;s some kind of reintroduction of a fairness doctrine or equal time or whatever, we have to break through people& #39;s bubbles. 5/

I don& #39;t have an answer here, but the most prolific liar in history in the White House right now demonstrates why this needs to be fixed. Transparency - especially with money - is the only thing everyone agrees can happen, but that& #39;s just the start. There needs to be more 6/

done to add incentives to publishing and promoting the truth. Whether that& #39;s additional public funding for journalistic enterprises, some kind of regulation on promoting bullshit, or I don& #39;t know, we have to do something. 7/7