We are concerned about the spread of political advertising that is untraceable, untrackable, and unattributable. This form of advertising is paid for by either political candidates, political action committees, rich donors or foreign governments. It most often comes in the form of highly manipulative images overlaid with text. Most of the examples we have seen in the run-up to the 2020 US Presidential Election have spread the message that people were overreacting to the Covid pandemic. These were clearly designed by talented advertisers and psychologists to improve the likelihood of Donald Trump's reelection. These memes are also mixed in with agitation messages delivered from foreign enemies to sew division and chaos.

Any party who wishes to use media to achieve a goal, beit to elect a candidate or cause chaos, should provide links attached to their advertisements that explain who they are and what their goal is. Furthermore, no media company should be able to take in revenue from sources attempting to achieve political goals without disclosing who these people are and what their goals are.

We cannot expect the media companies to police themselves due to the sheer volume of the media and perhaps due to some arguments of censorship. The solution is to allow the users to label the content that seems to fit this profile. We are asking that the government force media companies to provide a button on every post that allows the users to label content as unattributable political advertising. These votes are to be tallied at the servers of the media company and if they exceed an agreed upon number, then action must be taken by the media company.

The most insidious aspect to these unattributable advertisements is that they are promoted to the top of our new feeds by the media company (for a fee) and they last at the top of the feed only long enough for the user to see them once. They then disappear from the feed. This acts to implant the ad in the subconscious with no chance that the user can subsequently analyse the content. We are demanding that when these ads are identified, they are then put back up at the top of users' feeds with a clear warning label stating that they are identified as unattributable political advertisements. The label should then encourage the users to discuss what the true intention of the ad is and who is the likely beneficiary.