This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 13th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Applying old school rules of political TV advertising to the internet has significant

implications for free speech. Alan Dickerson is an attorney at the

Institute for free speech. We spoke earlier this month. As you noted in your speech at today's talk here at the Cato Institute at the Who's Afraid of Big Tech conference,

you talked about Russia and Russia's influence in the presidential election of 2016.

What's wrong with an effort to try to crack down on the kinds of advertising or, you know, interloping that

Russians did to move the 2016 election.

Well, nothing at all, it's a question of how you do it. A lot of my

my concern is you know essentially that there's a lot of talk about ways in which this could be addressed, but I mean let's go back to the facts.

You know, the Russian efforts I think were substantial and sophisticated, but they were almost, you know, we're talking maybe a total of a hundred thousand dollars of spending on on ads

and the majority of Russian activity was not paid advertising which has been the

the thrust of most regulatory attempts and most of it actually wasn't about the election in the sense that, you know, it didn't say vote for,

vote against any of the candidates. A lot of it didn't even mention the election. Instead, it was discussions

about hot- topics, you know, usually as a matter of social policy and

usually on both sides of those I haven't seen a legislative proposal that would deal with what Russia actually did in 2016.

Again, you know, posting for the most part non-compensated, you know, not-paid ads, but just stuff on the internet and on social media platforms,

talking about issues of public affairs in divisive ways.

I have yet to see a legislative proposal that would address that activity without

spiraling into a really strict, frankly quite frightening regulation of Americans basic political

activity along those lines.

If you're going to regulate Russia's ability to put stuff on the internet about divisive issues of public concern, that's

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