I've wrestled with this question myself. I think you can differentiate them. I think there is a logic to differentiation to suggest that we have a standard for political advertising that is different from selling soap or bicycles, just as we do in broadcast ads.
It becomes more challenging when you start asking what a political ad is. It's interesting to see how the three big platform companies have defined political ads in what they put in their databases and what they apply their voluntary regulation to.
Twitter says an ad is only a political ad if it mentions a political candidate or a party. That's the Google standard as well. Facebook says a political ad is anything that mentions an issue of public importance, and they list about 20, including everything from climate to gun control to immigration. To me that's a much more honest presentation of what a political ad looks like. I think it's a mistake to limit your terms too narrowly, because people will just go around you and use different things as proxies, but once you begin to define it more broadly, the grey zone between what's political and what's non-political becomes more challenging to define.
I think it's like night and day: 95% of the time we can agree whether it's night or whether it's day. We'll adjudicate those 5% of cases that have legitimate opinions on both sides. I think they can be divided. I think that's the right starting point. If we find that a company can't distinguish between the two, fine; you can just make the same high bar for everything.