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Twitter to ban political advertising

• acollins1331 7y ago
  We don't let blatantly false ads run on TV. Why is it so hard for Facebook or Twitter to do the same thing?
  • throwaway5752 7y ago
    Because Facebook wants those ads. They productize the ability to run them, and it's revenue they want. They lie about or disguise their participation in the market and their policies policing that content. Facebook continues to take steps to get more of that revenue. It's not "hard", it's just just they don't want to do it.
    • busterarm 7y ago
      I'm not sure that's it. Twitter was going to be sued if they allowed one party to advertise but not the other. This decision allows them to still behave with some partisanship via their moderation policy. Facebook is taking the safer position in this case, IMO, from a legal/regulatory perspective. It'll be interesting to see what shakes out.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  • scarejunba 7y ago
    False premise: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/oct/15/elizabeth-warren/phony-facebook-ad-warren-said-most-tv-networks-wil/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/oct...
  • catalogia 7y ago
    > We don't let blatantly false ads run on TV. Did you cut the cable years ago? I think perhaps you've forgotten how bad some political ads on TV are.
  • malandrew 7y ago
    One word: scale A tv channel has like 6 to 9 slots per 30 minutes of content and most of those slots have the same ads playing multiple times in a day. I would guess that there’s at most 1-2 hours of unique ad content for one channel per week to review. With user generated content and thousands of unique ad slots, using humans to verify is prohibitive.
  • partiallypro 7y ago
    > We don't let blatantly false ads run on TV. Since when?
  • tracker1 7y ago
    There's some pretty misleading TV ads out there, especially in more purple (contentious) districts. Senate race in Arizona, for example have been brutal, and abstracted by PACs.
  • toephu2 7y ago
    Cause money makes the world go 'round?
  • jMyles 7y ago
    There are a lot of baltantly false ads on TV, and have been for decades. Remember "this is your brain on drugs"? Or how about the "drugs fund terrorism" super bowl ads? That was a blatantly false campaign designed primarily not to discourage drug use, but to make it difficult for mainstream organizations and their people from supporting drug policy reform. Isn't every Volkswagen ad which touted fuel economy in their diesel vehicles essentially a blatantly false ad on the issue of climate change and carbon use? Many pharmaceutical ads have some blatantly false messaging, whether overt or not, and all of them carry the same political message: that the current system of regulation and intellectual property around drugs is healthy for people. TV is overrun by blatantly false ads that, once you think about it, have an unambiguously political component.
  • chillacy 7y ago
    We actually do... https://www.thebalancecareers.com/should-tv-stations-ban-false-political-ads-3956480 https://www.thebalancecareers.com/should-tv-stations-ban-fal... For social media to start fact checking ads is actually a big change, but maybe the right thing to do, even if it's hard.
• magwa101 7y ago
  FINALLY. Now how hard was that??
  • toephu2 7y ago
    Very. How do you enforce it and what defines a political ad? Who gets to be the judge, jury and enforcer? A contract Twitter employee making less than $20/hour in a low-tax country like Ireland?
• CodeCube 7y ago
  Probably for the best
• jdkee 7y ago
  Here is Jack Dorsey's commentary thread: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952
  • psychometry 7y ago
    If only there was a way to communicate more than a couple sentences at the time over the internet. Someone should make that!
    • wmeredith 7y ago
      I find "tweet storms" insufferable
      • qnsi 7y ago
        you can thank pmarca for that one
    • notatoad 7y ago
      You can't really criticise twitter for this - last year they were all ready to launch a way to embed text posts in a tweet like images can currently be embedded in a tweet, until the userbase revolted and they had to cancel the plan.
      • catalogia 7y ago
        Really? The twitter userbase actually prefers it this way? That's baffling to me. Did the revolting userbase provide any reasons or explanations for this preference?
        • walls 7y ago
          The average Twitter user isn't interested in more than a tweets worth of information.
        • notatoad 7y ago
• jayess 7y ago
  Now the fun part -- defining political ads.
  • Barrin92 7y ago
    in 95% of cases it's a trivial decision, in particular if you want to stop the most egregious offenders. It's like the infamous line about porn, you know it when you see it. On edge cases time will work out standards, that's what these companies ought to employ humans for.
  • apendleton 7y ago
    I would say start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Magic_Words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Magic_Words and amend as necessary.
• duxup 7y ago
  Is this when we now start to wonder what will count as a political ad? Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?
  • mc32 7y ago
    I mean social movements are all political. So I guess grass roots will be okay, just not paid or paid endorsements. So no promoting of the Sierra Club by commercial entities... for example. This is going to be s can of worms.
    • reaperducer 7y ago
      Probably. But likely a smaller can of worms than allowing political ads.
    • wolco 7y ago
      Grassroots movements don't spend money on ads. They are the viral.. spread naturally and don't have an ad manager or staff. Once you start paying for ads you are an organization.
  • Analemma_ 7y ago
    The FEC has pretty clear rules about what constitutes a political ad, and presumably Twitter will be using those. But whether that satisfies the (both literal and metaphorical) parties who've been grousing about political ads on Twitter/FB is a different story. Twitter might correctly point out that a given contentious ad doesn't satisfy the FEC's definition and that still won't stop the complaints. Still, I think they're now in a better spot than Facebook.
    • jMyles 7y ago
      > The FEC has pretty clear rules about what constitutes a political ad, and presumably Twitter will be using those. I know that the FEC maintains guidelines for what Coordinated Communications, but I've never heard of this definition of "political ad" - can you provide a link?
• catalogia 7y ago
  This makes sense.. though I'm not sure it will do much in practice to improve political discourse. The combination of politicians having twitter accounts and twitter's content recommendation engine promoting politician's tweets make me think the perceived effect to the end user (twitter showing people messages from politicians or their supporters) will remain more or less the same. But because twitter isn't taking money directly from those politicians, it perhaps reduces their perceived culpability. It seems like a good move for twitter.
  • satya71 7y ago
    Not to mention, traditional journalists (who still have enormous reach) relying almost entirely on Twitter as their source.
  • rtkwe 7y ago
    It will remove the direct influence on who the ad gets sent to at least, a tweet will spread organically to a much wider audience than a targeted ad so messages cannot be as micro-targeted.
    • catalogia 7y ago
      Good point. Now if only we could ban micro-targetting in general. It's a corrosive force to society in a wide array of scenarios, not just political advertising. (For instance, it's been known to facilitate discrimination in real estate and the job market.)
      • rtkwe 7y ago
        I think for things like jobs, housing, etc that have protected civil rights the only real way to ensure people's rights aren't being infringed is to make them completely open and post both the ad and the stats of where the ad was served/the settings for the targeted audience depending on the type of . Maybe even need to directly test that the bidder isn't racially targeting with random test offers if it's a google style bot bidding system. A similar system is probably needed for political ads because one insidious fact of web targeted ads is there's much less chance to respond to and potentially debunk them if they're highly targeted. With radio and television ads you couldn't do that they'd go to everyone watching so more people outside the targeted demo would see.
• moltensodium 7y ago
  Jack's last tweet in this thread: >paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle Ignoring the technology aspects of this for a minute: he's basically arguing directly against the Supreme Court's Citizen's United ruling, which I find interesting. If we're going to argue that money is too corrupting in online political advertising then it really doesn't have anything to do with being online.
  • goodluckchuck 7y ago
    That is the popular understanding of Citizens United ("CU"), but "money is speech" had been the law for a long time before that. People have the right to "assemble and petition for redress." CU just said ~"given that people speak with their wallets, and people have a right to assemble, do people have the right to assemble and speak with their wallets at the same time?" So the Court said yeah. Really very innocuous. It's the side-issues that people are foisting onto CU. Like, wealth disparity. Maybe the problem isn't that people can buy MAGA hats and radio spots, but that a small group have such a large percentage of the money they can easily buy "all" the ads. The way to fix that isn't to restrict how people speak and use their wealth, but to address the wealth disparity itself. Then the other huge but undecided side-issue is the fact that corporate law allows companies to keep most all their info secret, money, members, etc. So when you combine CU-money with the "dark"-laws regarding corporate governance you get dark money. Again, the way to fix that is to address corporate disclosures.
• wnevets 7y ago
  Is #FreeHongKong considered a political ad?
  • kevincrane 7y ago
    No that's a hashtag
    • wnevets 7y ago
      clearly. But if that is the paid ad, is that a political ad?
• minimaxir 7y ago
  The real question is how long it will take for Facebook to follow suit.
  • toephu2 7y ago
    Who says they will? They just gained market share and more ad dollars.
    • qnsi 7y ago
      Political ads are by rough estimation about 1.1% percent of all revenue (calculated from https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2019/05/why-facebook-considered-ditching-political-advertising/ https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2019/05/why-facebook-con...) So not a lot, but still it's 1%
    • minimaxir 7y ago
      "Gained market share" is incidentally not what FB needs right now when they are already under heavy scrutiny for their political ad policies.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• brm 7y ago
  • partiallypro 7y ago
    "Bots" are such a boogeyman on Twitter, usually from older folks that just don't understand the nature of the internet. I've seen threads where completely legitimate people are accused of being "bots." If the problem were so extreme, it would be much more pronounced. It's incredibly hard to police, and it happens on every single platform.
    • standardUser 7y ago
      Some people may be conflating bots with paid trolls, which are a real and pervasive problem across many platforms.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • tracker1 7y ago
      Bots are also, generally, echo chambers that are easily detected.
    • proverbialbunny 7y ago
      Bots on Twitter thankfully are rare, but on Youtube, for example, there is quite a bit of bot activity.
  • rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
    They’ve been working on this for years. It’s a hard problem. How would you solve it?
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • ilikehurdles 7y ago
• gzer0 7y ago
  Will be interesting to see how Facebook plays this out now. Seems as if they are headed in the complete opposite direction.
• idoh 7y ago
  Final policy 11/15, enforcement starts 11/22. This seems like a tricky line to walk. For example, could I promote a Tweet about the UBI without mentioning Andrew Yang?
  • anchpop 7y ago
    I would hope not. They claim they're also banning issue ads
• slg 7y ago
  One of the key aspects of political content on social media is that you don't necessarily need to buy ads to get your message in front of people. You can instead pay for an army of bots to spread your message and make it appear as genuine user generated content rather than a prepackaged advertisement. So while this decision by Twitter is in my opinion good, what are they doing to cut down on inauthentic political engagement that has become a hallmark of the platform?
  • busterarm 7y ago
    You can also get an army of real actual people to spread your message and the company can just ban them and accuse them of being bots or having ties to some government without actual evidence.
    • tyre 7y ago
      Your comment is written in a way that implies that this happens. Do you have evidence to back that up? Not evidence that they take down suspected state-sponsored brigading, but that they were wrong?
      • ambicapter 7y ago
        > You comment is written in a way that implies that this happens. I think his comment his written to imply that it is possible for this to happen. In which case, it does not require supporting evidence beyond the logical consistency of itself, which is sound, I believe.
        • syrrim 7y ago
          busterarm is almost certainly referring to chinese "bots".
          • busterarm 7y ago
            That's also an interesting phenomenon. There are a large number of Chinese citizens on the internet who will shout down with comments any message counter to the party line there. They are real people, aren't they?
• pacificleo12 7y ago
  Kudos to Jack for this step. it will put pressure on FB to act responsibly. however Now the debate will shift to what is a political ad. its like superpac and political party symbiosis again
• proverbialbunny 7y ago
  Campaign finance is illegal in most of the first world. If political ads were banned in the US, politicians wouldn't need money to get reelected (Ads get the majority of votes.). When a politician needs money to get reelected they have to take money from lobbyists. Banning political ads is crucial linchpin to getting money out of politics.
  • partiallypro 7y ago
    Political ads are free speech.
    • proverbialbunny 7y ago
      There was a campaign finance law in 1971 that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. In Buckley v. Valeo, the US Supreme Court ruled that campaign finance laws are freedom of speech, in that without such laws, the every day person is restricted from being heard when the wealthy are allowed to use money beyond what the common person can pay. Because of this, the court upheld limits on contributions to candidates ruling campaign finance is legal, as long as it is limited to an amount everyone can participate in. From the Supreme Court: "The Court affirmed a First Amendment interest in spending money to facilitate campaign speech, writing, "A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached." Further, the law's "$1,000 ceiling on spending 'relative to a clearly identified candidate,' would appear to exclude all citizens and groups except candidates, political parties, and the institutional press from any significant use of the most effective modes of communication." The Court upheld limits on contributions to candidates. For more information checkout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo edit: In 2002 there was another campaign finance law that went to the Supreme Court, again for freedom of speech. In McConnell v. FEC, the court ruled, "the need to control corruption overshadowes any minor threat to free speech".
      • partiallypro 7y ago
• tyre 7y ago
  Good for them, and good for us. Without controlling bots and sockpuppets, it's not a total fix. Still, a step in the right direction. Given the larger overlap between Facebook users and people who vote, we'll need follow-up from Zuckerberg to really make this stick. Step in the right direction.
  • lonelappde 7y ago
    Twitter has been famously hugely toxic to humanity and democracy for years, and that was strictly on the non-ads side of content, and Dorsey has refused to do anything about it because he craves those engagement numbers. Paid ads are a sideshow distraction.
  • x2f10 7y ago
    I don't follow politics nor do I follow these discussions, but I wonder how many people are influenced from a politic ad vs how many people are influenced from bots. I'd _guess_ bots are much much much much more influential.
• 1zael 7y ago
  How much annual revenue are they losing by this?
• justapassenger 7y ago
  Quote from Jack > We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Will they also ban politicians? Accounts buy followers to grow and look legit, including politicians. Just removing ads isn't removing power of money, as people are (and will be) spending a lot of money to get organic reach. Some of their most popular accounts are politicians accounts. That brings tons of traffic to Twitter and makes money for them. While I don't disagree with their decision, I think they maybe overstating positive impact it'll have.
  • mandeepj 7y ago
    > Will they also ban politicians? I don't think they will. 'Politicians ban' will be equivalent to banning free expression, and twitter is against that.
    • justapassenger 7y ago
      They also say that they don't want money to be giving uneven power to politicians, but that's totally happening without ads.
      • badrequest 7y ago
        True, but it's also _very much_ being facilitated by advertising.
  • buboard 7y ago
    So be it. At least from their business side, they are clearing themselves of responsibility. They are a company, they dont have a duty to arbitrate political discourse in general.
  • mshafer 7y ago
    Accounts can artificially inflate their follower count with money, but they can't use money to make _me_ follow them. I think that's the difference with paid advertising, where you can buy the ability to reach anyone.
• partiallypro 7y ago
  There's really no reason to run political ads on Twitter, and I doubt Twitter would have made this decision if it actually hurt them financially in any meaningful way. Politics on Twitter is quite simple, say something and get your crowd to retweet it. AOC and Trump are the masters of this, they get a lot of political messages/lies/misleading messages out, and they don't spend a dime on it. Facebook is a different animal altogether in terms of politics.
• kpU8efre7r 7y ago
  ITT: They'll switch to bots! They'll just start doing x! So? We can address that when we get there. This is a step in the right direction for once.
  • TheJoYo 7y ago
    when we get there?
  • b34r 7y ago
    Agreed, just keep filling in holes until it’s impractical to dig new ones.
• nlh 7y ago
  Bravo. That whole thread is smart, well-reasoned, and puts democracy above profits. Good for them. I particularly like his last point: > A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address. Which I cannot read in any way but “f-you, Facebook.” And honestly, he’s totally right. This issue is NOT about freedom of expression...it’s about freedom to pay for expression (and freedom to pay for having others see your expression), and I don’t think that’s inherently a good thing. It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about.
  • buboard 7y ago
    > Which I cannot read in any way but “f-you, Facebook.” He was even more explicit: > For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ”
    • zouhair 7y ago
      It's easy to blame Facebook, it is well known Zucky needs the money, rent is not cheap in California.
      • dang 7y ago
        Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
    • Consultant32452 7y ago
      I'm skeptical of this. Is a private charity promoting an LGBT fundraiser a political ad? What about Fox News pushing an ad about how other news is fake. Or MSNBC pushing an ad about Russia collusion? Was the now infamous Gillette woke ad political? It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
• rexpop 7y ago
  What ads aren't political? At this point, when politicians are just reputation-laundering spokespersons for multinational financial interests, it makes no difference whether you advertise for the candidate or the product. Perhaps this will disincentivize investment in electoral politics, but it won't rescue the public discourse from financiers' influence.
• blotter_paper 7y ago
  I don't agree with every call Twitter makes, but I find Dorsey to be by far the most interesting public figure in the social media game. His two JRE interviews[0][1] and his Tales from the Crypto interview[2] are all worth checking out, IMO. He seems to think Twitter should use a blockchain in the future, and that small social circles should have a system for internally moderating content without needing it to be okay by Twitter's standards, but obviously they're still currently taking down content that breaches their policies in $CURRENT_YEAR. I'm really interested in seeing where Twitter goes, I think Dorsey plays realpolitik sometimes but I don't think he has the same goals as Zuckerberg. I could be wrong, and Dorsey could just be a next-level showman, but I'm hopeful that he might do something truly interesting with the platform. I've still never made a Twitter account. [0]: https://youtu.be/_mP9OmOFxc4a https://youtu.be/_mP9OmOFxc4a [1]: https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ [2]: https://talesfromthecrypt.libsyn.com/tales-from-the-crypt-61-jack-dorsey https://talesfromthecrypt.libsyn.com/tales-from-the-crypt-61...
  • aakilfernandes 7y ago
    I'm not sure why a blockchain is needed for this. Can't they just have an API where certain posts are "flagged" and hidden in the official UI? If you want to opt-out, you simply use a UI that doesn't hide flagged.
    • nexuist 7y ago
      It is not enough because the true goal of moderation is not to hide content people don't like, but to lock out people the majority of people don't like so they can't communicate or work together to spread their (probably hateful) message. Putting it on a blockchain is abdicating responsibility for any and all content, saying "hey, we just wrote the code, we don't store or propagate any of this ourselves."
      • kllrnohj 7y ago
        Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility. Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost, and then they would still have fully responsibility over it. If they just want to decentralize & use peer-to-peer instead they could also do that, and a blockchain still wouldn't be a useful aspect there. That's just a mailing list.
• eli 7y ago
  Twitter doesn’t have much political advertising, unlike its rival. This is a probably very effective PR move more than anything. Timed to coincide with FB’s earnings no less.
• rubicon33 7y ago
  I recently started running ads for a company I own. I'll keep it vague but, the company is just a SaaS for tracking legislation in a certain interesting way. Annoyingly, Facebook decided that I was advertising Political content, and therefor requires a whole series of additional verification steps, as well as a disclaimer of the fashion "Payed for By _______" right beneath my ad. Needless to say, it gives my advertisement a feel which I don't think it should have. It's not a political advertisement. Nor is it about a political, or social issue. Nor does it promote anything - campaign, legislation, or otherwise. It's an ad, for an app, that provides access to data in a totally unbiased (and unaltered) way. TLDR; These companies are casting a really wide net in the wake of the election ads scandal. Unfortunately, some people are getting targeted who (IMO) shouldn't be and there's ZERO recourse. No phone number to call, no rep I can explain things to, nothing. I appealed the decision and it was - no joke - instantly denied. If twitter is anything like Facebook, this means I can no longer advertise my app on twitter. Lame.
• koolba 7y ago
  And of course this has the consequence of reinforcing the entrenched players with large follower counts’ messages.
• badrequest 7y ago
  Genuinely impressed by this statement. They seem to have put some real thought into this, and like it or not, they're an advertising company rejecting business for what they see as the greater good. Bravo.
  • buboard 7y ago
    It's also a smart business decision. Avoiding the entire scrutiny and questions of regulation is worth more than the (modest) amounts spent on online political advertising.
• gfodor 7y ago
  For this to work, they need to start immediately with an incredibly conservative policy, akin to the presumption of innocence in the justice system. An ad should be presumed political unless it can be shown, through a series of positive affirmations with the burden of proof on the ad-maker, that it isn’t. Avoid the slippery slope by saying that some non-political ads will be banned to ensure all political ads are. For unpaid speech regulation this would be an insane standard, but for paid speech it’s a just one.
• hos234 7y ago
  Salute to Twitter for doing something proactive and not just reacting post facto. That's what leadership is.
• lonelappde 7y ago
  So only pro-consumerism political ads are allowed now. So Toyota can buy ads to promote their gas burning cars, but I can't buy ads to encourage people to stop burning up the environment. Only profit-seekers can buy mindshare. This whole debate is absurd. Trump rose to the White House on $1B worth of unpaid media exposure by being an outrageous personality. How is that better for democracy than paid ads?
• SirensOfTitan 7y ago
  From what I recall Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez questioned Zuckerberg, she questioned along the anecdote of: If I purchase ads on Facebook saying Republicans support the Green New Deal (but they don't), will Facebook take the ads down? I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficult to determine. Even when truth is easy to determine, there are few arbiters of information that everyone alongside the aisle trust. As a result, no matter how easy or difficult truth is to find, without trust no one will believe the truth even if they hear it clearly. I find political speech pervasive, and believe that almost everything a person says or does has some political element. Determining the periphery of political speech,as a result, would be inherently political.
  • CobrastanJorji 7y ago
    I completely agree with what you're saying about the difficulty of cleanly separating political vs nonpolitical speech, but for specifically the case of U.S. political issues, one could imagine a hack of defining political ads as "anything that would need to be reported to the FEC as an expenditure."
    • vonmoltke 7y ago
      > one could imagine a hack of defining political ads as "anything that would need to be reported to the FEC as an expenditure." That misses a whole bunch of political advertising. Most of it, I'd wager.
      • briandear 7y ago
        A sympathetic news outlet is often treading on the edge of political advertising as well. Some TV station airing a favorable or unfavorable documentary on a candidate during election season when executives of those stations have publicly supported (or not supported) a candidate or party seems no different than a PAC buying an ad on that same station.
• golemiprague 7y ago
  It makes sense, the only way to go is either to ban it all and not play in this field or allow it all. The problem is with the politicians demanding censorship which must be aligned to their political leaning so Trump/brexit/scomo/salvini or whatever other right wing politician "will not get elected again".
• jariel 7y ago
  Even though we might be cynical about politics - it's really important. It's how people express their voice through legislation etc.. It's as 'American as Apple Pie' type thing. I disagree with this ruling. They need to ban the fake ads and memes, not 'Vote for Joe Schwartz for City Alderman'.
• crazygringo 7y ago
  Wow. That's gotta be a lot of money they're leaving on the table, no? I totally support it. But I've also got to be brutally honest: I wonder if this is a sincere moral stance on Dorsey's part, or more of a business calculation that, leading up to the lightning-rod 2020 election, accepting political ads ultimately has the potential to do more damage to Twitter's reputation than the money would make up for -- or have them wind up being on the wrong side of, and in the subsequent targets of, whoever does win. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's happily both.
  • qnsi 7y ago
    For FB political ads make about 1% of revenue, if I am calculating correctly (source https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2019/05/why-facebook-considered-ditching-political-advertising/ https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2019/05/why-facebook-con...) I know you asked for Twitter but I guess it's similar. Zuckerberg also considered dropping political ads altogether, as they are controversial
    • dopamean 7y ago
      I think Zuckerberg actually stated this recently somewhere. That political ads may not even reach 1% of revenue.
  • dragonwriter 7y ago
    > That's gotta be a lot of money they're leaving on the table, no? OTOH, it means political messaging on the platform will be entirely controlled by how the firm manages the organic newsfeed, which even if in theory it is subject to election and campaign finance laws, there is very little regulatory experience or direct case law on. Shutting out official ads actually magnifies managements freedom to shape the political narrative and the relative power of illegal influence operations. And non-obvious astroturf probably is better for engagement on the platform than overt political ads.
  • buboard 7y ago
    It s certainly not worth the risk of being regulated post-election. It's a good decision and FB should do the same.
• dmode 7y ago
  Excellent start from Twitter.
• Trias11 7y ago
  The best political ads does not sound political at all. Yet these could subtly touch on subconscious minds of potential voters to move the needle toward specific party, movement or candidate.
• netsharc 7y ago
  I was wondering how he was going to explain this in 140^w 280 characters...
• shadowgovt 7y ago
  Their heart's in the right place, but mechanically, doesn't this shift the money from "pay for an ad on Twitter" to "pay for a bot farm / human clickfarm to like and reshare the tweet?" Twitter's engagement model (popularity ∝ importance) is still flawed in gameable ways, and political operations have the money to pay to play those games.
  • twoodfin 7y ago
    Agree, but at least now the “game” has viewpoint-neutral rules.
• alkonaut 7y ago
  It will be very hard to draw the line between political messages and everything else. Many areas of the market are almost impossible to make non-political ads in (fossil fuels, health insurance, ...)
  • tomatotomato37 7y ago
    What are you talking about, most of the advertising in those industries has nothing to do with whatever their lobbyist are doing. It's just menial PR shit like "Save 20% at United Healthcare", or "Work on cutting-edge technology at BP", or "Monsanto now offers consulting services to help you optimize your crop gains". Maybe once in a while they flash some statistic about how diverse their workforce is or whatever but most of it is just generic commercialism. It's only really in the valley that companies think listing opinions that significant percentages of the country disagree with is a good way to build marketshare.
    • alkonaut 7y ago
      I should say for some parts of business it seeems impossible to entirely avoid political messaging. If BP, Monsanto etc. make 100 ads, 90 of them will not be political. 1 will be actually political, but 10 of them will definitely be accused of being political. It will create a problem for those trying to draw a line.
• unfunco 7y ago
  Employee morale probably goes through the roof?
• FillardMillmore 7y ago
  It makes me wonder if Zuckerberg has seriously considered doing this as well for Facebook. Considering he's been in congressional hearings twice, I'm sure the thought has crossed his mind once or twice. The money is too good, so he's likely willing to walk the tight-rope. I think Twitter is setting a good precedent here, whether other similar social media sites will follow suit is the question.
• dwoozle 7y ago
  Smart. The revenue is hardly worth getting regularly dragged in front of Congress. Best to leave influence over the political discourse to the Internet Research Agency.
• dmix 7y ago
  One thing about the first amendment is that it doesn't have conditions. This type of thing that Twitter is doing will be full of them, ie selectively defining what's political or not. The question is whether this is a lesser evil than allowing political ads but selectively blocking stuff with very broad and potentially inconsistent moderation rules. I personally think totally blocking is the easier of the two in terms of decision making but I expect this will generate far more false positives in the end on the fringes and grey areas. It's a good thing we'll now have two different experiments, on a large scale, to see which one is more self-destructive. One of the main problems that I see is the outsized influence we've given to the very-vocal but small parties on social media to have on silencing other people and groups, going well beyond the limited free speech exceptions we previously observed in society for over a century (culturally, not just legally). Neither of these approaches really addresses that problem at FB/Twitter. Which is why I'm curious which one is going to expand those grey areas, where the abuse/downside risk remains, rather than reducing it.
  • octonion 7y ago
    The First Amendment is about government suppression of speech. Furthermore, deliberate lies are (legally) not legitimate speech.
    • vonmoltke 7y ago
      > Furthermore, deliberate lies are (legally) not legitimate speech. That is not correct: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/does-the-first-amendment-protect-deliberate-lies/496004/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/does-th... > Under U.S. law, many falsehoods—even some deliberate lies—receive the full protection of the First Amendment. That is true even though “there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact,” as Justice Lewis Powell Jr. wrote for the Supreme Court in 1974. Nonetheless, the Court has often refused to allow government to penalize speakers for mistakes, sloppy falsehoods, and lies. Political lies are strongly protected; but even private lies sometimes are as well.
      • JulianMorrison 7y ago
• gnicholas 7y ago
  Apparently there will be exceptions for encouraging voter registration. But will people be able to target these ads in ways that blatantly (or subtly) target members of a particular party? Can I promote a tweet encouraging people in a particular state to register to vote? Probably. What if I target people who like the NRA or Planned Parenthood? Same question for voter turnout tweets ("don't forget to vote tomorrow!"). The devil is in the details.
• trileansoftware 7y ago
  Good luck with that. Anything that can put in a good light some public policy or is remotely related to some politician can be seen as political ad. Politicians already make use of that kind of veiled advertising with hot button issues. And there's a reason sometimes campaigns are mostly the same at the core except for PROBLEM X WHICH MUST BE SOLVED NOW OR WE ALL DIE.
• mattlondon 7y ago
  Perfect timing! Just as the UK election campaign kicks off, they ban advertising for it so we can hopefully finally see a partial reduction to the lazy journalism of "reporting" on how people are reacting to Party X's ads on twitter. Journalists and politicians seem to put a lot more emphasis on twitter than most people seem to care about.
• ereyes01 7y ago
  This is nice that they aren't selling/boosting political ads (though apparently there's no solution for buying bot armies). However I feel that the root of the problem remains unaddressed- a small group of private companies with their own whims and interests is becoming the sole arbiter of speech and public discourse.
• clay_the_ripper 7y ago
  I see a lot of calls here for facebook to follow suit. I run a facebook advertising agency and use their tools every day (including the political advertising tools) and would like to offer some perspective on the potential nuances here. When I run an ad on facebook, if the ad contains "issues of national importance" that ad is subject to the same rules as political advertising. From facebook, this includes any ads on the following topics: -civil and social rights -crime -economy -education -environmental politics -guns -health -immigration -political values and governance -security and foreign policy Some examples of ads that I have run and had personal experience with that would then be banned if facebook enacted a similar ban: -Ads for any non-profit or charity dealing with the environment. This would include ads raising money to combat de-forestation in the amazon, setting up marine sanctuaries, or ads about drilling rights in the arctic (all ads I have seen recently or worked on creating) -Any ads about women's rights or reproductive rights. This includes any ad for planned parenthood, or similar organizations. Also includes ads for charities that raise money to support women's rights in other countries. -Ads for charities raising money to support refugees in Greece. In fact, every ad for every charity that does basically anything would be banned. These charities deal with issues that are inherently political: the environment, reproductive rights, human rights...the list goes on. So if facebook banned all this advertising on it's platform, what were going to end up with is a situation where the internet (for all intents and purposes, for millions of people "the internet" is essentially facebook) is a place totally devoid of anything that is not a strictly commercial enterprise. Selling T-shirts is ok, raising money for charity is not OK. Maybe this is the boundary we want to collectively set. Also, saying that this is only for paid reach specifically is not really fair. Paid reach is the only kind of reach that actually exists for all intents and purposes on these platforms. It's a pay to play market. If you ban all political ads, you are also banning anyone from advertising anything that deals with "issues of national importance" and this will hit charities (and anyone with a message that is not strictly commercial) particularly hard. We work with personalities who want to sell T-shirts with political messages on them, for example. Those will now be banned. We work with a yoga studio that wants to highlight their commitment to full time employment for their employees. Those ads would be banned. We work with an author who writes about abortion. Ads for her book would be banned. Is this the kind of platform we want facebook to be? Like it or not, facebook is how millions of people engage with the world. I don't want to live in a society that is so afraid of political speech that we have to ban everything that might hurt us. Let us decide for ourselves what to believe. Are some lies going to get through? Yeah they will. But that's the consequence of allowing more "free speech" on a platform. Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want. They have no obligation to uphold free speech. Personally, I think Mark Zuckerberg understands that banning these things sets a dangerous precedent, and I only hope that he is able to defend his decisions and explain his reasoning. Because the alternative to allowing some lies to get through in ads is much much worse.
• tibbydudeza 7y ago
  Okay Zuck ... now your turn.
• 0x445442 7y ago
  This is just a pretext for Twitter to allow left wing political ads and ban right wing political ads. Twitter is incapable of holding itself to any kind of objective standard.
• erichocean 7y ago
  No, they're not. Anything Twitter supports politically will be deemed "non-political" and "basic human rights" or whatever, and they'll allow it.
  • happytoexplain 7y ago
    What makes you say that?
• jsonne 7y ago
  They need to be transparent then with how they prioritize organic content. They've replaced a transparent system (advertising) with an opaque one (organic feed) and that has consequences.
• bedhead 7y ago
  Beyond spineless of Jack and everyone at Twitter. Political ads seem to work just fine on TV, radio, print, and everywhere else on the web. Pathetic that Twitter decided to bow down to the most paranoid in our society. All he is doing is validating these stupid conspiracy theories and cementing how scary it is that he has so much control on freedom of expression in modern society. I will bet anything that Twitter allows political ads for the 2024 election with Trump gone.
  • munificent 7y ago
    > Political ads seem to work just fine on TV, radio, print, and everywhere else on the web. It's hard for me to interpret those other media as working "just fine": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton#Horton_in_the_1988_presidential_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton#Horton_in_the_19... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_Door_(advertisement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_Door_(advertisement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Vets_and_POWs_for_Truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Vets_and_POWs_for_Truth
• tqi 7y ago
  For the people who think this is a good idea, would you also be in support of a constitutional amendment to ban political advertising?
  • olivierlacan 7y ago
    Absolutely. In many European countries, including France where I'm from, there are never any political ads until an election season (which could either be tradition or regulation). During election season political ads are tightly regulated to prevent someone with a higher ad budget from swarming the "airwaves" with the kinds of disinformation/propaganda that is so prevalent on U.S. television networks and other media. Political ads (and statistical coverage of early poll results) is also banned in the days before a major election to diminish the impact of manipulation/disinformation campaigns (discouraging voters because they assume their vote won't matter).
• 3wolf 7y ago
  I'd rather they did something about their obvious problem with bot amplification than banning clearly marked advertising.
• roadnottaken 7y ago
  Why hasn't this issue come-up with print advertisements? Seems like it should've been addressed eons ago...
  • smileysteve 7y ago
    Print advertisements have a history of being subject to editorial review.
    • roadnottaken 7y ago
      And? do those editors have a history of allowing or blocking untruthful ads?
• product50 7y ago
  This is a cop out solution. We don't want to be a part of this debate and neither have the capital to be - so we will just not show any political ads. Social media is just like television in some ways - it is a channel for users/businesses to magnify their voice via ads.
• anm89 7y ago
  I think this is an excellent move for twitter. The problem now will be determining what is a "political ad" which I'd imagine has a lot of edge cases but if they can do it I think this will be a huge win for them.
• product50 7y ago
  So why not use the same methodology on TV or print as well and ban political ads across? Why is social media singled out here? What about ads on YouTube? This is nothing but a copout solution. Twitter doesn't have the will nor the capital to be part of the debate here (and political ads are likely too small for them to care) - so they are trying to gain strategy credit by just saying this is a bad idea. NYTimes is happy to take money for political ads while they are shouting that FB and Twitter should do fact checks.
  • belltaco 7y ago
    Perhaps because of hyper targeting? News media and fact check sites cannot even see some ads that are shown since they are not in the target market, so they cannot fact check or report on them.
    • product50 7y ago
      Facebook has a public database where all political ads are visible to anyone. Media is free to report on them.
  • jaf656s 7y ago
    It's harder/impossible to deliver hyper-personalized political ads in those other mediums. It's worth taking some time to figure out the ramifications of all this.
  • heylook 7y ago
    IMO the difference is a combination of two things: * the unprecedented targeting ability of social media ads vs traditional broadcast/print * the unprecedented amount of disinformation (especially from foreign governments) vs traditional broadcast/print If you can't see the difference between the two, frankly, you haven't been paying attention.
    • product50 7y ago
      Foreign govt can also pay for political ads via TV/print as well. Most of the foreign govt interference is not via ads but via organic channels such as FB Pages, FB user accounts, Twitter accounts/bots. Those will continue to operate regardless of this decision by Twitter
• bobsoap 7y ago
  > For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ;)” I can't agree enough with this. Very well put, and I think we all know who the winky smile refers to.
• account73466 7y ago
  "Political" is a view that is not in line with common sense ... which is entirely based on our political view.
• Aperocky 7y ago
  Freedom of expression inherently includes the freedom to pay for expression. What are your expression worth if you wouldn’t be able to pay a service, cellphone/internet connection/reddit gold to express that? How is paying ads different than paying a campaigner set up a loudspeaker in the middle of a city? But then again, since twitter is a private enterprise, I fully respect their right to act on their own platform.
  • asdf333 7y ago
    freedom of expression is different from freedom to pay to amplify the expression.
    • streblo 7y ago
      Account age has no bearing on whether a comment is high or low quality.
    • asxd 7y ago
      I don’t think the age of their account should be a factor in the validity of their arguments. It would be one thing if our rights were restricted so that we could never pay for reach of expression. That seems like it would be a violation of free speech. But in this case (as noted) it’s a private entity enforcing their own legitimate policy exclusively on their own platform.
    • Aperocky 7y ago
      Yes, and freedom of expression includes people who created account 3 months ago, who decided to amplify his message which are then read by you here. In order to do that, the person paid for internet, electronics, invested time and thought into this practice. The right to pay for something using money is inherent as the right to spend another resource such as time or labor.
  • baddox 7y ago
    I think the distinction is very clear between paying for telephone service to call your friends and family and running an ad campaign.
• tolstoshev 7y ago
  They're still gonna pay for reach, just with botnets instead of ads.
• Sommer 7y ago
  I'd love it if Dorsey did this for the right reasons (and applaud the effort regardless), but seems far more likely that this netted out as a bigger publicity win. A policy of "there are no Twitter rules for politicians, just don't make us a direct accessory to it" is disingenuous at best.
  • thebokehwokeh2 7y ago
    I'd argue that in this case, intention is far less important than the outcome.
• tasty_freeze 7y ago
  Whenever these topics come up, the comment section is full of people advocating for no limits based solely on slipper slope arguments: who is going to determine what is politcal? Who is going to determine what is true? But we all life with boundaries and we cope just fine. Why should this street in front of my house have a 35 MPH speed limit? What is special about 35? Why not 36? Why not 34? Who is to say that one is better than the other, so let's not try and all and let everyone pick their own speed. Just as it would be possible, but stupid, to invoke slippery slopes to argue there should be no speed limits, invoking slippery slopes to argue against any regulation is a cop-out. Why not advance a real argument vs just arguing picking the optimal boundary is impossible?
  • mattrp 7y ago
    Heh... I find it funny that this issue underscores just how difficult it is for humans to uniformly decide on ground truth... but oh sure, let’s turn everything over to AI... that’ll be awesome! (Sorry for the non sequitor)
  • Barrin92 7y ago
    yep, the whole "who decides on the truth?" thing is extremely irritating. Do we throw out every court case now because apparently it's impossible to determine what is fact and what is fiction, or to establish common rules or guidelines for conduct? We've been doing nothing else for thousands of years.
    • ben509 7y ago
      A basic legal doctrine is that "it's better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be unjustly imprisoned." If anything, prosecutors have been taking your attitude and gaming the system with plea deals, so you're not merely wrong, but horribly wrong.
      • Barrin92 7y ago
        and I don't see how this doctrine is violated if companies like twitter act with caution when in doubt. (which they have every incentive to do) But nobody says "Johnny the crazy axe murderer gets to roam free because who is to decide what is true or not?" Which is just about where the speech debate is for some people.
• adamch 7y ago
  For everyone asking why Twitter or Facebook should treat ads differently to TV. There are some huge differences between the economics of the platforms that I haven't seen anyone mention. Each TV station has a limited number of ad-seconds they can allocate per day. Because ad-seconds are scarce, prices are expensive, so you get a small number of expensive ads. OTOH, Facebook can support a practically unlimited number of ads, shown to different users, changing as people scroll. It is _much_ easier to fact-check or apply human judgement to a small number of TV ads than to millions of social media ads. Disclaimer: I don't work in the ad industry, I know nothing about this. I just haven't seen anyone talk about the difference in scale here.
• Nerada 7y ago
  Smart move from Twitter. By removing the speech of people they disagree with under the guise of vague and selective ToS enforcement, they're still able to push their own political agenda, while removing the recourse that political advertising would allow.
• musgrove 7y ago
  It's hard to imagine what this gesture is meant to solve. Political ads are far more innocuous that the everyday posts of its users, which divide, cement and sway people's opinions and thoughts much more forcefully. I'm not saying ban those, but just saying you're not going to run ads, when that's the least of any problem's solution, is kind of superficial.
• IronWolve 7y ago
  My favorite, Jack says people can just re-tweet articles and news from popular accounts. Then twitter bans these popular accounts. Wait a min....
• 40acres 7y ago
  Seems like the right move. Personally, I think we are reaching the edges of what we can reasonably expect from social media companies. If a politician is lying in their ads, is it up to a social media company to decide the truth or well informed citizens to decide fact from fiction? In some cases the easiest way to win is not to play. Hope Zuck gets the message.
• yters 7y ago
  What defines a political ad? For example are prolife ads political, even if they mention no laws or politics? What about ads that do not mention politics but are targeted to influence policy? Seems like an ambiguous category except for outright promoting particular candidates and laws.
  • enraged_camel 7y ago
    >>What defines a political as? It's like porn: hard to define precisely, but you know it when you see it.
  • nicoburns 7y ago
    It's not that hard. The UK (and I believe most of Europe) has heavily regulated political advertising. Politicians can't advertise on billboards here, and TV slots are strictly regulated (and time-limited). I'm not entirely sure what criteria are used, but it seems to work reasonably well.
    • dabeeeenster 7y ago
      The entire problem in the UK is that digital ads are almost completely unregulated (or regulated so pathetically as to be unregulated). If facebook follow this, that would be a massive step in the right direction.
    • pjc50 7y ago
      .. but not on the internet, which produced the current disaster.
      • nicoburns 7y ago
        Indeed, and newspapers are arguably problematic too. But I think it demonstrates that regulation can be done without the definition of what it covers being too controversial.
    • ben509 7y ago
      That doesn't mean they're doing it fairly. It just means that people have accepted that certain voices are silenced.
• hota_mazi 7y ago
  Wouldn't Trump's tweets fall in the category of "political advertising"?
• SXX 7y ago
  This can be very bad globally. In countries with totalitarian regimes like Russia advertising on Twitter was one of few ways to reach politically active audience in order to make people go and vote. It's literally impossible to buy political advertising anywhere since government will put pressure on anyone who make business with opposition.
• cronix 7y ago
  This will definitely help the party and candidates that are barely raising any money compete with the one that is breaking all records. It would be like a fire hose competing with a squirt gun. We just can't allow that.
• raz32dust 7y ago
  I commend Jack Dorsey for his ethics. I think there could have been a better solution though - why not just disallow targeting on political ads? Only allow coarse-grained targeting, say at a state level. You still give political campaigns the opportunity to leverage the network and spread the word, and you get at least part of the revenue. The problem with social media advertising is the targeted nature of ads. If you take that out, and place ads like DuckDuckGo does, it is not that different from newspaper ads and much less dangerous.
• gnicholas 7y ago
  I've advertised on twitter, and you can either promote tweets or promote your account. When you promote an account, it raises the visibility of the account, its description, and recent tweets (which people end up seeing when they consider following you or learning more about you). So promoting an account can have the same effect as promoting a tweet, though perhaps at a higher cost (because it's a less efficient way of promoting a tweet). If political advertisers end up doing this, twitter may profit from their policy shift, but without actually achieving the putative goal.
• softliving 7y ago
  ads are nothing but propaganda, someone trying to sell something it could be good or bad. I see twitter where there are fake profiles and their posts. twitter allows anyone to register with a fake email using services like mailinator and continue spreading lies. They should be banned. I think ads are okay as we have been manipulated by ads via media newspaper etc. no one questions them, what about the news reporter who is biased and writes news like the ads. Atleast the ads we know are ads and sane person can determine based on history that ads are not truth.
• dillondoyle 7y ago
  I help run a digital political agency (with partner(s)). Still thinking through this but a few initial reactions that might provide a different perspective: - I haven't found a lot of utility in Twitter outside of reaching really specific insiders/decision makers. In terms of direct response FB is far superior and FB also wins with targeting, reach, and the persuasion/recall studies we've done as well. That is to say TW doesn't get much if any of our client's budget. Seems some larger 'brand name' candidates get better direct response. Point is it's a small fraction of our digital spend, and I would guess far less than .5% of twitter's ad revenue. - what about paid 'influencer' or social marketing ads? e.g. I pay person XX to post organically. Or the much larger problem of bots/fake/gamed content. - TW seems to be (I can't quantify though maybe others can) to be either totally inept at reducing fake/gamed content at worst complicit because they need the growth from fake numbers. This seems like it has much larger impact than paid political advertising and should be the first thing to get serious about. This seems like if the goal is to lose weight cutting your nails probably isn't the first thing to do. - I had a strong reaction reading Dorsey's tech points saying ML, micro-targeting are 'powerful and very effective for __ advertisers.' But to me it seems odd to make a differentiation that it's ok to use these 'extremely effective' tools to profitably 'target and force people to see their __ ad' while blocking political speech (to help this point I left political/commercial blank, try flipping them). TW will happily 'force people to see' ads for alcohol, sugar companies, etc and the point is it works, whether selling a politician or product or Disney if the tech is dangerous for politics why isn't dangerous for commerce (or where is the line in dangerous commerce)? IDK I think I have a different perspective on the fundamental importance of political speech than this group. But this seems like an odd argument to me. To that point of drawing political lines, what about a company advertising to sell copies of a racist book on replacement theory, which has been shown to correlate with recent rise of dangerous white nationalism (mass shooters buy the book) and externalities like electing Trump?
• mcintyre1994 7y ago
  Given the pretty terrible experience that all social networks are on mobile, this should make Twitter slightly less awful. With the election coming up in the UK I can’t imagine Facebook being remotely usable for the next few months.
• gnicholas 7y ago
  This move will increase scrutiny on the ICYMI algorithm. Does it pick up tweets on one side of the aisle more than the other? Do people know how the algorithm works, and can they game it to increase distribution of their political tweets?
• m0zg 7y ago
  I'm skeptical AF. How do you determine what's "political"? To use AOCs example, would ads supporting the Green New Deal be considered "political" or "environmental advocacy"? How about ads supporting Black Lives Matter or illegal aliens or ads against ICE? Targeted to a particular audience even the, on the surface, non-political ads can become strongly political. If Mueller's investigation is to be believed, that's mostly what "election interference" efforts did: they trolled the left with propaganda from the right, and, the same time trolled the right with propaganda from the left, portraying both sides as unhinged idiots to each other. No need to be super creative or anything, just stir shit up and sow discord. Do this long enough and heavily enough and you'll permanently damage the United States.
• NN88 7y ago
  what about bots?
• randomsearch 7y ago
  Please, can we all stop saying “but what’s a political ad?” Surely HN commentators are smart enough to try to answer their question before posting it. Well, did political ads exist before social media? How does that work? Etc etc.
• linuxdude314 7y ago
  If only spinning up bots was considered as part of political advertising. I don't think political ads were ever really a problem on Twitter. The crux of Twitter's problems are what I like to call virtual populism (i.e. bot armies retweeting propaganda and fake news). With virtual populism, the illusion of an organic movement is created and this illusion eventually draws in real humans (after all, bots don't vote).
• cm2187 7y ago
  Call me a Scrooge but my read is rather that whoever wins will piss off the opposite side, who will blame social media like they did in 2016, and there is no scenario where twitter doesn't ends up the target of more regulations unless they stay away from the elections as far as they can. This will not help with trolls and viral campaigns though.
  • toxik 7y ago
    I think it’s about ducking out of the crossfire. Why Scrooge? This policy is obviously not decided on a single argument, though it is a heavy one.
  • pm90 7y ago
    This is a great point, but ducking out of politics is exactly the right move here to avoid that kind of charge. Regulation will come with any functioning democracy. If an entity other than the State has too much power, Democracies will eventually dismantle or defang it, as they should.
• asdf333 7y ago
  good job jack
• umeshunni 7y ago
  Good to see this. Look forward to seeing TV and print media ban political ads as well
• sergiotapia 7y ago
  Why is traditional media given a hard pass while tech companies are being fisted by this - that honestly they shouldn't even concern themselves with?
• appleflaxen 7y ago
  This is a step in the right direction, but fails to go far enough. When Trump can exhort violence without being shut down, Twitter is being hypocritical, and putting profit over democratic principles.
• DSingularity 7y ago
  So, in conclusion — Facebook is anti-democracy and twitter is pro-democracy.
• heretoo 7y ago
  I'm seeing a lot of discussion relating to US laws, but this tweet says the decision is globally applicable. How are the US laws relevant to the decision?
• tyfon 7y ago
  In Norway political TV adds are banned, I wish it would apply to all media. The democracy works much better when you have to make a proper argument instead of just having the best ad. I'd also like to ban political polling, it is used to push a narrative far too often instead of discussing the actual issue. Another issue is that parties will shape their positions according to polls and not what they actually think. Lastly, some people want to be on the "winning team" and will pick party based on who is in the lead. I fully support this move by twitter.
• gojomo 7y ago
  Jack's "earned not bought" effectively means that Twitter's opaque & self-serving algorithms, rather than explicitly disclosed prices & targeting, will control what political messages get "reach" on Twitter. Twitter's bullhorn will thus only be available to those people and messages that Twitter likes. Those messages that Twitter doesn't like will be algorithmically confined to a unlighted cellar, for display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
• throwGuardian 7y ago
  But Twitter and most of social media's employees are overwhelming Democrat. Google's Public fillings show 87% donated to the Democratic party, and no one in top leadership donated to the Republicans. This is such a bogus move, because Twitter knows Trump has out-raised opponents by leaps and bounds, and the only way to cut his message is to stop all political adverts. Remember, Twitter actively engages in censorship that overtly leans left, so much so that over the past 10 years, PEW research has found a massive, unmistakable tilt to the left in Twitter membership, which was close to 50-50 not too long ago.
• radium3d 7y ago
  Bots don't have a citizenship ("chinese", "russian"), they merely push the agenda of the person/persons who have paid the most, no? Are there not many hijacked computers, routers, devices inside the USA and many other countries which are one of the most important parts of the bot networks to evade detection? I wonder if now that political advertising is banned on twitter if the illegal / immoral bot and human armies of agenda pushers will have a larger advantage than before now that those who follow the rules have lost their outlet of spreading their message with their donors money beyond their own profiles and their existing followers?
• lpolovets 7y ago
  I'm still not sure what I think about the ban, but one potential downside is it will give people with lots of organic reach, like celebrities and incumbents, a big advantage. Before you could use organic reach to combat paid reach and vice versa, but now organic reach is the only thing that counts. For example, if The Rock runs for governor of California next year, it will be very hard for his opponents to compete (at least on Twitter, and on any other platforms that follow this policy).
  • erichocean 7y ago
    Even further, it is well known that Twitter throttles follow counts and shadow bans people They Don't Like™, so Twitter is already artificially promoting some people, and demoting others. And that's before we get into the outright suspensions. Twitter doesn't have organic speech, period. And now they're justifying why they allow some political ads, but not others.
  • joshred 7y ago
    Isn't organic reach a little more meritocratic than just throwing money into paid ads?
    • lpolovets 7y ago
      It is, but I also suspect that more checks and balances would be a good thing in this situation.
    • vowelless 7y ago
      The effect of "meritocracy", at least in this context, is not linear. Every incremental unit of influence or fame (followers, impressions, etc) leads to super-linear influence between some interval (probably tapers off at the tail). And it is not independent / non-zero sum. If "A" gets more influence, it may take from "B"'s opportunity. And if the growth function is indeed super-linear, then B's opportunity is very quickly squashed.
    • buboard 7y ago
      It shifts the burden away from twitter, thats why it s a smart move. In the grand scheme of things it s not really more meritocratic. A bunch of awareness campaigns will no longer be possible, so we won't know if they had merit
• jacobsenscott 7y ago
  Twitter makes more from "free ads" than paid ads, and they just want an out. The out is "we aren't making money from political ads!". When you go check Trump's latest tweet (which can be full of lies) or Uncle Buck's retweet (which can be full of lies) you are also viewing ads. Twitter stand is simply: we won't make money directly from political ads because 1 - we don't make money there anyway, and 2 - this is good PR. However we will make all the money we can off ads tied to the free for all of russian bot posts, AOC posts, Trump posts, and Uncle Buck retweets. Anyone who thinks Jack Dorsey cares at all about democracy vs profits has blinders on.
  • codezero 7y ago
    Totally agree with this. I find it odd that Twitter doesn’t view organic reach as actually black market paid reach, or at least some component. Part of the value of running a legit ads campaign is the finances and incentive to beat away fraud and black market/black hat techniques.
• colorincorrect 7y ago
  counter argument: having something explicitly labeled as "advertisement" allows for people to take it into context. now that that route has been taken away, advertisers would pursuit native marketing, even more subversive.
• subsaharancoder 7y ago
  Would a pro-life advert, which has obvious political ramifications depending on which side of the divide you are on, qualify as a political ad? I ask because Twitter has actively been blocking/stopping pro-life organizations from running ads with zero transparency on how the decision was arrived at or which policy it violates, but doesn't apply the same standard to pro-choice groups and in fact gives them carte blanche to continue running ads. Twitter has clearly shown its bias on multiple occasions and I don't expect this to change in the short or long term.
  • subsaharancoder 7y ago
    Vijay Gadde of Twitter: here's our current definition: 1/ Ads that refer to an election or a candidate, or 2/ Ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance (such as: climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security, taxes) https://mobile.twitter.com/vijaya/status/1189664481263046656 https://mobile.twitter.com/vijaya/status/1189664481263046656 Just shut down Twitter and let's move on
• coleifer 7y ago
  Still waiting on them to ban those fake accounts.
• vowelless 7y ago
  Does this not give an advantage to people like Trump, who have a large following and media attention, thus letting them still "advertise" via their own tweets? Couldn't people with large followings take money to tweet on behalf of others?
  • nautilus12 7y ago
    This is just another way of saying that advertising has evolved and twitter is only cracking down on advertising 1.0 and not advertising 2.0
• danboarder 7y ago
  I know this is about people paying for posts with money, but if one zooms out a bit to think about this -- any user of a platform like Twitter is paying/spending time (aka paying in their time and attention). IMO, trying to police and stop people from spreading their ideas online (political or otherwise) is a fools errand, and the antithesis of how social networks function.
  • jimkleiber 7y ago
    I'm starting to see Twitter and Facebook more like the newspapers, and really, more like the delivery service. Perhaps I could print anything in a newspaper, which I can't, but even if I could, someone would have to deliver that newspaper to the doorsteps of people for them to read it or they would have to go try to find a copy in the store. These platforms already have delivery routes determined through algorithms, already choosing who receives which newspapers. What role do you think these networks should play in distributing these posts to our door?
    • danboarder 7y ago
      Well that is a similar line of reasoning that has been applied to ISPs that deliver internet itself, and I think music publishers took that line when suing ISPs for facilitating piracy. I think all forums and UGC platforms deal with this in their own way. (like Reddit, they mostly let each subreddit have their own mods that decide what content and topics they want to allow.) In Twitter's case, I am skeptical of the end game with their current approach, where the loudest in the room tends to stand out.
• AdrienLemaire 7y ago
  Great move. This will push some communities to move away from Facebook and use Twitter as the main political discussion medium. I'm wondering how that'll affect Twitter's business model though. Assuming political ads counted for a fair percentage of their revenue stream.
• throw7 7y ago
  "democratic infrastructure". jack dorsey is selling you something.
• jimkleiber 7y ago
  I look at the analytics for one of my Tweets and at the bottom it says: "Reach a bigger audience. Get more engagements by promoting this Tweet!" ...or what Jack said: paying to increase reach. I think I always thought that Twitter ads were these magical separate entities, when really, they seem to be normal Tweets that are just paid to be more popular.
• not_a_cop75 7y ago
  But who's going to ban marketers harvesting immense numbers of twitter accounts for marketing? Doesn't sound like they are at all opposed to those things that will make them look popular, since on paper it will increase their numbers.
• eternalny1 7y ago
  This is fantastic. I recall seeing a Tweet from US Senator Lindsey Graham today which was essentially a hack-job attempt to raise additional defense money for Trump. My first thought was "this really needs to be flagged", until I noticed the small little "promoted" tag under it. Well, no more of that nonsense.
• nemo44x 7y ago
  Perhaps it’s my own selection bias but why does it feel like everyone thinks this will righteously hurt republicans and be beneficial to democrats? I feel like this is a major blow to democrats more than republicans as democrats have a larger audience on Twitter. Do democrats not think they too benefit from carpet bombing ads?
  • faitswulff 7y ago
    That's in-line with the announcement, though: > We've made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. > - https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952 If Democrats have a larger audience, they don't need to pay for the exposure, they already have it.
    • nemo44x 7y ago
      I guess that’s true in many ways. But I wonder how much is preaching to the choir across the board here as the dynamic is following people you mainly don’t know. Meanwhile the ad spend can be reserved for networks full of more middle-of-the-road people. I guess that’s the big battle ground. And I wonder if republicans can direct more ad spend there now that Twitter is off limits. I guess I’m wondering if Twitter was a necessary drain on their resources they don’t have to worry about now?
• willart4food 7y ago
  What's a can of worms! Who decides what's "political" and what it's not? Wait for it..... the shit show has just begun!
• wessorh 7y ago
  We just learned that political speech isn't trouthful
• reubens 7y ago
  I think this kind of response muddies the issue. Refusing political ads by political parties or promoting political parties is a clean way to define things, and it sounds like this is what Twitter has done. You can argue that any other advertising is still political (e.g. retail ads promoting a ‘capitalist agenda’).
• artsyca 7y ago
  What's missing from this dialogue is the idea that Twitter is fundamentally a political organization, just as a soapbox is a political tool
• lucio 7y ago
  Isn't he implying at some point that people are not smart enough to think for themselves?
• woeirua 7y ago
  There is a third option here. Instead of a blanket ban, or selective enforcement of "fact checking," we could neuter the utility of online political ads by simply requiring similar disclosures to what you see on television and by limiting the ability of advertisers to target individuals. If advertisers could only target certain demographics (e.g. 18-35, 35-50, 50+) in larger regions (multiple zip codes, or even entire states), then the ads would be essentially equivalent to TV ads, which I would assume most people just completely ignore. Otherwise you wind up in this super nebulous area where you have to either be an arbiter of the "truth" or what qualifies as a "political" advertisement. Also, I would be in favor of an outright ban on all advertising until X days within the election, where X is < 60 days.
• irrational 7y ago
  "We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we're stopping these too." - Jack Dorsey So... what is the definition of an issue?
  • jes5199 7y ago
    Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde tweeted a reply to someone who asked this question: “hi - here's our current definition: 1/ Ads that refer to an election or a candidate, or 2/ Ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance (such as: climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security, taxes)”
• tehjoker 7y ago
  This is certainly, on the surface, a great leveling of the influence between oligarchical interests and the people. I'm hopeful it will play out that way. I suspect that the oligarchs will simply redouble their efforts on buying bots and influencers instead of clearly marked adverts. This is certainly more expensive for them, more uncertain, and more likely to blow up in their faces if someone is determined to have been paid. Certainly it may also reduce attainable reach. It's difficult to see how this will play out even though the alternative strategy is obvious. Hopefully the people will chalk some advantage. EDIT: As others have noted, corporations, which are inherently right wing, will still be able to promote their messaging, so there is some disadvantage to the left. Marketing pay-day loans? That's a right wing exploitative program for example.
• known 7y ago
  Is it due to Elizabeth Warren complaint?
• nullc 7y ago
  I believe Jack's statement, while obviously well intended, is misleading. Twitter will stop accepting money for political advertising. This is not the same as "stop(ping) all political advertising on Twitter". Other people will continue promote things there and get paid for it regardless of what twitter's policy is. I worry that a widespread misunderstanding of this will increase the public's vulnerability to paid manipulation on Twitter, particularly in a way that maximizes the impact of the least honest parties.
• moksly 7y ago
  In Denmark we have laws in place that hold news paper editors responsible for printing truth. They don’t always succeed, but they try to, and when they do fail they admit it and apologise. This is what has kept our society well informed and critical thinking for a hundred years. It’s also allowed for different sides of things, because you can interpret things like socioeconomic statistics and facts differently and write about them as such, but you can’t make up things. This died with Facebook, YouTube and the non-editorial entertainment “news” and as a result we have anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and what not. I have no idea how to regulate it though, but I think we need to do something.
  • Kalium 7y ago
    The question is always if the cure is worth than the disease. It is easy to fall into the Politicians Syllogism, and wind up adopting a terrifyingly bad policy out of a sense that something must be done*. Choosing to wait and observe is always a viable choice, to be considered alongside all forms of intervention.
  • pojzon 7y ago
    > and when they do fail they admit it and apologise We have those laws in Poland too. They lie on front page and apologise with small font on the last page.
    • red_trumpet 7y ago
      I wonder what happened if the apology had to be as prominent as the false fact. Imagine a newspaper saying "WE LIED YESTERDAY" on the front-page :D
      • RaiseProfits 7y ago
        Oh wow we could have avoided the entire Iraq war!
    • ekianjo 7y ago
      Sounds like insurance companies with fine prints.
• z3phyr 7y ago
  Does USA have something like an election commision? If a candidate or their representatives publish false information in the election season and any citizen complains about it, the election commision can try the candidate and perhaps even ban the candidate from participating in the elections. The onus is directly on the liar to not lie
  • bashallah 7y ago
    Yes there is an election commission. The recent actions by certain Republican congress members have reduced the efficiency of said commission to zero. We also have to deal with some important Supreme Court rulings: 1) Politicians can lie during campaigns, 2) Unlimited Super PAC funding of candidates, and 3) Coporations have the same rights as individuals
  • smsm42 7y ago
    > If a candidate or their representatives publish false information in the election season /.../ perhaps even ban the candidate from participating in the elections. So we'd have elections with no candidates at all. Or, more realistically, we'd have ones that have opinions matching opinions of those people who sit on the commission. Nice system, though it's not clear why bother with elections then at all - we just let the commission - after all, people who know all the truth must know how to select good people who tell the truth? - to choose suitable candidates. Elections where candidates that the commission doesn't like are excluded are no elections anyway - you can look at Russia how it works, they have "elections" exactly like that - people not approved by Kremlin largely just are excluded from participation, so nobody can vote for them.
    • z3phyr 7y ago
      I just realized that the USA does not have civil services. Like your elected officials can appoint random people for random things. Anyway, a good election commision can be formed by pooling career civil servants, equal representatives from each political party, a bench of retired judges elected by the Senate for a unit time. The commision can not make any policy decision. All they can do is ensure that the elections happen in a clean way. Also banning is one of the extreme decisions, but if they do ban the candidate, the party has to provide someone else to contest. A democracy where all candidates are liars is no better than Russian democracy where there are no candidates
• jdjjdflknfjj 7y ago
  Aren't political ads rather important for democracy? Without ads, how are you supposed to announce your newly formed political party? So it's a democracy - you can form a party to represent your political desires, and try to be elected. Except you can't really tell anybody about it? Suppose you walk from door to door, and you tell grandma Smith about your new party. Then grandma Smith goes to Twitter and writes how great your party is. If Twitter doesn't like your party, what are the odds of Twitter marking grandma Smith's account as a bot and claiming she did political advertising? Of course Twitter as a private company is presumably allowed to do this. I just don't understand the general argument against political ads.
• uranusjr 7y ago
  How do you implement it though? I live in Taiwan and constantly see ads from People’s Daily, which usually contains text sneakily promoting CCP propaganda. Do those ads count as political? I hope so, otherwise China would most definitely exploit this. But then do you also ban, say, FOX? The NYT? I really like Twitter’s decision and the idea behind it. But I also worry this would end up toothless toward bad actors, and restrictive for those who want to act morally.
• aurelien 7y ago
  They should also ban group of people that spam as advertiser. Most of time they works in the same room and are paid by the politician party to spread the word about the polyworm!
• ThinkBeat 7y ago
  Who decides if an ad is political? Does this mean that it is a block for direct political buys by a candidate Or will they go through every single and and judge each one if it is political or not?
• synt4x1k0 7y ago
  A similar discussion took place here when they took action on Alex Jones. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17929417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17929417
• lawzup 7y ago
  i think its right to ban political advertising
• intended 7y ago
  This will get lost, but we need to end paid news. Independent new agencies - truly independent, with only one stated goal, being factual.
• maxehmookau 7y ago
  Hooray! This is unequivocally a good thing. Twitter is admitting it can't police political advertising on the scale that it runs. So it's banning it. This is a good move.
• kmlx 7y ago
  i guess the stock market shorts weren't wrong after all. $twtr is looking pretty bleak right about now. otherwise, like all good deeds, this will mainly affect smaller parties that don't have enough funds or traction. big ones will continue to advertise via established (i.e. more expensive) routes.
• bernardlunn 7y ago
  This is huge and amazing move. I am a big fan of Twitter and @jack and love their backing of Bitcoin. I love it when the right thing to do is also the financially smart thing to do.
• aykutcan 7y ago
  they can't even prevent fake bank twitter accounts and their pnishing ads. Or they don't want?
• rkop 7y ago
  One can only wonder if this policy would take place if these ads helped democrats in getting the office in the last election. I would say definitely not. It's silicon valley and this company's left-leaning CEO.
• dr-detroit 7y ago
  Twitter still exits? Huh.
• mkr-hn 7y ago
  This will fail the same way "real name" policies fail. Someone has to draw a line on what politics (or a real name) is for the purpose of the policy, and that's going to cut off a lot of useful ads. For example: An ad for free HIV screening services is political by certain perspectives.
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• btbuildem 7y ago
  Suppose we applied a basic test to a potential ad: does it sell a product or a service? If yes, you can buy ad space for it. If it's "selling" a concept, idea, way of life, promotes a group, organization etc (basically, NOT selling a service or a product), it's deemed political and cannot be aired. Would that work?
• parasanti 7y ago
  I wonder how shareholders feel about this? Also, is Twitter going to be neutral on what politicians it selects that get's reach?
• rebuilder 7y ago
  When did paid political ads become such a big issue? I was under the impression it was all the bots and organized trolls that Twitter and Facebook were taking heat for.
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• quietthrow 7y ago
  SO PROUD OF YOU JACK (and TWITTER)
• throwawaymanbot 7y ago
  Only Brad Parscale and RT (Russian TV) appear to be annoyed by this. Cant think of why that would be....
• Seahawkshacker 7y ago
  I support the banning of political ads on any platform that can be subject to manipulation an or have thousands of bots then go to work to support a side (not real people). Political ads are nothing more than money in politics. Make politicians spend that money instead on traveling to towns and having town halls, greeting people on the streets, businesses, and in as much in person instead. Have them earn it, not just sit back and have some marketing person create ads for them.