Twitter has decided to ban political ads, rather than wade into the quagmire of evaluating the truthfulness of such ads, as noted by NBC News:
Twitter announced Wednesday that it will no longer take political ads, a major step as tech companies work to deal with misinformation ahead of the 2020 election.
The ban will go into place in November.
In a series of tweets, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey laid out the company’s reasoning, focusing on the downside of political advertising when combined with digital advertising.
“While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions,” Dorsey tweeted.
“Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale,” Dorsey added.
I suppose I should be embarrassed that I didn’t even know that Twitter had advertising at all, but I’ll skip the pretense. I do not see much utility to Twitter as a societal entity, and so I don’t care. Rival Facebook’s policy?
Facebook is currently embroiled in a debate over its decision to allow political campaigns to push ads containing misinformation. The company has said it does not think it should be the arbiter of political speech, though it does stop companies and political committees from using false information in ads.
This all reminds me that I treated a topic I’d consider a close cousin of this one back in early 2018 as part of a conversation with a conservative friend of mine. The last post of that thread is here, but I’ll summarize because the posts are long. He argued that there really is no such thing as a free press dedicated to facts, but rather always-biased actors; to suggest that some news sources were worse than others, even those sponsored by national adversaries, was an error, and to suggest an audience cannot discern truth vs manipulation was an insult to the audience. I disagreed. If you want more, follow the above link and find your way to the beginning.
My point here, though, is that Dorsey has acknowledged two things:
- The difficulties of policing paid political ads. Issues of facts vs partial facts vs lies, presentations, and even timing (think of Comey’s announcement concerning Clinton near the end of the last Presidential campaign) makes the task of policing such ads Herculean.
- The influence of social media on the national discourse. Some folks may dismiss it, but it’s become apparent that social media can be used to polarize American society.
Social media hosted on the Internet is, unless special preparations are taken, naturally an international phenomenon. This means that, politically, both domestic and foreign powers can access them and use them for their own ends.
A domestic political power, although sometimes malignant, is usually acting in what it sees as the best interests of the nation.
As I noted in my conversation with my friend, no such assumptions can be made about a foreign power. Given that no one can be required to reveal their associations in the arena of social media, and the difficulty both technical and non-technical individuals to track down this obscured yet critical information, all the messages one receives on social media from people you don’t know are suspect. (Contrast this to the services offered, present and past tense, by traditional news media, the best of which considered it a requirement that they track down and report such associations to reader. The loss of such traditional new sources will continue to prove to be one of the most under-reported, yet important losses to American culture as the years pass.)
Now, as I understand it, Twitter’s ban is on paid advertising; non-commercial accounts can still spew as they wish. Non-commercial accounts only communicate with those that have signed up for such communications, and they lack, for the most part, impressive names to attract the unwary; an important exception is someone like President Trump. However, this should still put quite a dent in the reach of malevolent entities. And there’s tentative proof of this, as a certain Matthew Dowd has observed (I know nothing about Mr. Dowd, so I’m merely tentative so far as proof goes, but I assume it’s not hard to track down confirmations for the Twitter pro):
The two main entities attacking Twitter for its banning of political ads are: Brad Parscale/Trump campaign and Russian state television. Hmmm…..
— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) October 31, 2019
So Putin’s pissed, eh? Given Special Counsel Mueller’s report on the Internet Research Agency (here’s a nice link sympatico with this post), this comes as no surprise.
