Right, it would prevent abuse, but it probably would prevent legitimate action as well since even the world’s biggest asshole can get at least 25% of people to side with him.

I won’t disagree with that, but there are still lots of people who consume mainstream media. A lot of them also think that their choice of media isn’t mainstream, only other media.

It’s not that it’s an unpopular take, it’s that you’re not going to get that from mainstream media. They only want snippets and blurbs to present to the people, so if you’re not able to articulate your point in a short sound bite, you don’t get to send your message at all.

3/4 of electorate signs a petition which gets verified

Good luck getting 3/4 of any group of people to agree on anything. Even 2/3 would be a hard target to hit.

The video stream without the ads really only exists pre-broadcast. I don’t think there’s anything at the consumer level that could reasonably do that to the ads injected into the video.