—but you could have 1,000 custom audiences of 1,000 to make up a million, and you have 1,000 different messages to a million people.
The point that I was going to make was that rather than say targeting is outright a bad thing and we shouldn't have it, there are really positive use cases, particularly with motivating under-represented groups in democracies to show up and vote. Simply requiring platforms like Facebook or Google or Twitter to publish every single ad that is being sent out on their platform would allow journalists, governments, parties, whomever, to look at what ads are on this platform and, in addition to that, the actual targeting specification for those adverts.
Currently, we do not know what goes on Facebook, on Google, on Twitter, in terms of targeted advertising, right? A simple solution to that would be to require those platforms to simply report what happens so there can be public scrutiny. In that way, you avoid necessarily creating a number of rules to restrict what you can and can't say on a platform, or having some cumbersome regulator. That would allow civil society and parties to scrutinize messaging in the same way they would if you were standing in that public forum. However, it would not prevent the really positive use cases of targeting, in particular engaging people who are under-represented in politics right now.