I Sold Political Ads for Google. Banning Them Won’t Work.

In the novel and movie Thank You for Smoking, the antihero Nick Naylor is part of a group named the “Merchants of Death”—or the “MOD Squad,” as the members also call themselves. They’re shills for the most hated industries in America: firearms, alcohol, and, of course, Big Tobacco. I think they need to make room in the club for me, because I used to sell a product that has become almost as reviled: digital political ads.

While political campaigns have used digital ads for more than a decade, the practice came under intense scrutiny after the 2016 election, after Facebook revealed that Russians had bought $100,000 worth of . In recent weeks, have criticized the founder Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to exempt all political ads from fact-checking. Late last week, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey went to the opposite extreme by announcing a ban