We have highly regulated TV and radio advertising. Many rules that are supposed to apply on social media need to be updated, but they are definitely under-enforced because of the micro-targeting issue, as you suggested. During the Super Bowl, everybody knows the ad happened. It's almost impossible to detect if a political party or an interest group is targeting an ad just at me because it happens to know my consumer or political preferences.
What I take from all that, though, is not to throw our hands up and say, “Let's stop regulating advertising because there are new avenues.” We need to make sure that all the avenues are regulated in a way that furthers the level playing field. One practical suggestion that I've tried to make in this debate is that we might need to consider a separate spending limit for social media, because it is cheaper than traditional television advertising. As Mr. Mayrand said, these are new technologies. It's an emerging challenge. It's hard to point at one jurisdiction that's gotten it correct.
That would be one way to try to adjust to the fact that social media ads are so much cheaper, but that might not always be the case, right? I think studying how the Facebook ad auction system worked in the U.S. has revealed large differentials in the amount of money particular campaigns were spending, based on who they were targeting and the content of the ad, because the platform may have an interest in keeping your eyeballs on their platform, which encourages certain kinds of content.
There are a lot of variables in the price of an ad that I don't think we should assume should be constant. We don't always know that Facebook advertising on politics will be a lot cheaper than television advertising, for example. The cost of a print ad in The Globe and Mail has gone down pretty dramatically in the last number of years.