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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
I'm not a Twitter user myself, but the character limit is what made Twitter unique. It might be fun to laugh at people who only want to read 140 characters, but we shouldn't assume they aren't going elsewhere to post and read essays. A lot of people use Twitter and reddit/Facebook/HN/ect.
That would make sense if it were numbers for my tweets. I don't get any dopamine hit from seeing that Jack Dorsey is getting another thousand retweets every three seconds. It just makes me give up on reading and close the tab.
We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
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.
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.
These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.
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! ”
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.
We’re well aware we‘re a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.
In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.
We’ll share the final policy by 11/15, including a few exceptions (ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed, for instance). We’ll start enforcing our new policy on 11/22 to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change goes into effect.
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.
>While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics,
It's kind of horrifying that one can make such a statement, acknowledging the dangers of advertising, but still insinuating that commercial advertising somehow isn't dangerous and harmful, just the political ads...
Whenever you see an ad, remember that they've diverted funds from improving the quality of their product and paying their workers well, and instead decided to use that money to try to deceive and manipulate the public into forming a positive impression.
> 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! ;)”
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following:
> You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple.
Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.
Of course it is workable. You approve ads as they come in. If the marginal value of the ads isn't high enough to justify human review, you kill those ads. It might be expensive, but it's not impossible.
Using "scale" as an out doesn't fly. Sometimes you have to cut back on growth and/or scale to do the right thing. No human review clearly hasn't worked, so either automate or get humans in there. More likely, start with the latter and replace with the former over time.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think one thing a lot of people don't realize is just how incredibly long the "long tail" is in self-service ads. I would not be surprised if more than 99% of potential ad impressions fall below the cost-effective-to-manually-review threshold. So requiring manual review on all ads is going to mean a lot more sacrifice than cutting back a little. It could mean a lot of these companies would be profitable at all. It's also unfortunate for the vast majority of advertisers in the long tail that are perfectly acceptable.
Automating can help with the more obvious stuff, but there are many ways it can fail in either direction. For example, failing to detect hate-speech dog whistles, or inadvertently suppressing ads from minorities where the language patterns fall outside of what it sees as "the norm".
Anyway, like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you. These systems definitely need considerable improvement, but doing that isn't as trivial as it may at first seem.
Automation + human classifiers + user reporting. The stuff automation gets wrong or isn't confident about goes into the training set and the system improves.
Even if they lose money by manually reviewing a small ad that was flagged as possibly political, it doesn't mean it costs more to review 1/100 low-volume ads. They're also paying to classify useful data to train their model.
A lot of social networks will crawl pages for content.
For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0]
No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content.
Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges.
There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page.
It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction.
I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most.
Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it?
Those are a civil rights group and a health care provider. If your politics are opposed to civil rights or health care then you may consider them "political" but they aren't. Not by any reasonable definition.
I'm pro-choice, and support/donate to Planned Parenthood, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that abortion is a political issue — 40% of the country thinks that it should be illegal.
I also donate to ACLU, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that it predominately backs left-leaning policy viewpoints, and vocally so — again, fundamentally political in nature.
If an organization lobbies to receive taxpayer funding, or lobbies to change laws and legal rulings, they are political. Whatever else they happen to offer doesn't cover that up.
My guess is that it depends how it is phrased, the imagery and the landing page. "Donate now", ok. "Donate now to keep NRA working for you", ok. "Donate now so we can fight policy XYZ", probably not.
This is really interesting, because it seems that in some cases (ex. NRA or EFF) it doesn't actually matter what the ad copy is. It's very clear why they're soliciting donations (to lobby for their ideological viewpoint).
So in your example, I think it's absolutely clear to most adult Americans what "Donate now" means. It means "Donate now so that we can fight for your gun rights" or "Donate now so that we can fight for a free and open internet".
I do worry that Twitter is just ratcheting up the difficulty they're already facing with political speech on the platform.
American Cancer Society is a good example of an organization that is clearly, unambiguously political, but which most people probably don't want banned.
Ultimately, every position you can possibly advocate - including the position that you want people to purchase something or donate to someone - has packaged with it some vision of how society might best operate. In other words: in a society where decisions are made in a political way (which is a good thing), every message is political. Every message.
The quote you posted just seems intentionally dismissive. The truth is that whether any content is political or not depends much more on the views of the audience than it does the content itself. Outside of ads that political campaigns would want to run directly, this means that twitter will be arbitrarily deciding what content is political (and therefor not allowed), and what content is non-political (and therefor allowed). The only possible outcome is that twitter moderates the content based upon whatever political perspective they choose to adopt for this.
There'll be a lot of feeling out that line because it's impossible to draw a distinction that will work in every case. It'll be especially hard in cases where particular issues become heavily associated with one party or another though I guess they could just say product ads only, that would probably be a little easier because the line between a political and non-political product is a bit easier to draw.
Major League Soccer is going through this problem now. They prohibit political displays in stadium but are now in the business of deciding whether signs that say things like "anti-racist" or "anti-fascist" or "end gun violence" are political or not, and all of the worms that come out of that can.
The difference is that it's easy to have "a private org can set its own logically inconsistent policy" (and every possible policy except "everything is allowed" is logically inconsistent) but impossible to have "we will only allow universally agreed upon good things in this space".
I wouldn't have a problem with expanding that to include social issues. You bought a ticket to see a game, not a billboard.
This is a problem I have with modern social movements, when they fail to get audiences in public spaces they seek out captive audiences or to be disruptive as possible to completely unrelated places. Hold your rally in a park or march down main street or a pedestrian way or in front of some place you're protesting. Stop walking down highways and forcing your messages in places which have nothing to do with your cause.
“I’m here for bread and circuses and I’d appreciate it if you kept your uncomfortable reality away from me so I don’t have to confront or think about it”
What is functionally different between "marching down main street" and "walking down highways"? Many places basically have highways as psuedo main streets.
It doesn't really seem like MLK's Selma to Montgomery march or Ghandi's Salt March would've passed this smell test.
> You bought a ticket to see a game, not a billboard.
Absolutely. So let's get rid of advertising at games. Not just political advertising; all advertising. No Democratic or Republican ads, but also no Toyota or Chrysler ads, no Coors or Bud Light ads. Unfortunately, there's too much money at stake for that to ever happen.
But political ads are different. I don't think Coors drinkers get offended when they see a Bud Light ad.
Does it matter? The point isn't that tickets will become unaffordable, the point is that the sports leagues themselves will disappear.
Sports isn't something people need. Some sports leagues cost a lot of resources to run. If these sports leagues become less profitable, then some of the investment will move into other entertainment and your sports professional league will slowly disappear.
Clearly this apocalyptic prediction begs the question of how much investment is required, since we're have a variety of shorts with different levels of spending, and raising over the past 20 years. If there were 2se less money in football, it's unlikely to disappear
I don't think this is apocalyptic. It's not that football would disappear, but professional football leagues would or they would be diminished. I don't know whether that has a significant negative impact on society.
I don't think that the impact of less professional sports on a societal level will be very significant, but if the reason to get rid of ads at sporting events is to make them better, then it's (probably) counterproductive to take steps that kill off a large portion of those events.
What is an ad? Can the beer cans say "Coors"? Can airplanes fly by with ads trailing? Can people's clothing display brands? Can the players' shoes have the Nike swoosh? Can pop-up shops sell their goods at the store or give out samples? Can a company buy tickets just to plant attendees who will loudly wear their brands? These are all forms of marketing. If they are permissible, then how do you enforce it? No billboards over a certain size? No audio or video ads?
Companies that buy advertising at games pay a pretty penny for it. Fans who buy tickets to games have paid to watch the game, not to advertise their cause. If fans want to advertise at games, they can pay the advertising rate.
Yes we must respect our corporate overlords, by their good graces we sit in their stadiums. It would be disrespectful to treat this private space like a public forum in any way. Even if the stadium WAS partially built using public funds...
Sorta. I mean, corporations are not entirely apolitical. For instance, during a recent heated pipeline approval process in my region, the pipeline company was running “look at all the good we do” feel good ads all over the place. They are not directly saying “vote for so and so” but are promoting specific ideas. Like car companies promoting the idea that your car represents freedom - that’s not apolotical. Cities have been rebuilt to accommodate a lifestyle car companies promoted.
If you were a social movement that wanted to get your message across, you wouldn’t seek out a captive audience? The distuption is part of how to communicate
What about my side project Read Across The Aisle? We make a free news reader app that helps people keep track of their media bias. That is inherently political (the whole point is to help people become more well-rounded), but running an ad for my free app shouldn't be seen as a political ad since we are devoutly non-partisan.
they aren't saying they're banning partisan advertising, they're banning political advertising. a non-partisan political ad is still a political ad.
that said, just because a product is free doesn't mean ads aren't "selling" it, which exposes the flaw in my criteria: if you're selling a political product, an ad can both be trying to sell a product and be a political ad at the same time.
Oh I realize that they wouldn't ban my ad. I'm saying that the heuristic you suggested isn't quite nuanced enough. It seems like this move will create lots of controversy and actually make political advertising on twitter more fraught (because it will still happen, but just not above-board). This may end up being a net negative for society if it pushes things into the seedier underbelly (gaming twitter's algorithms so your tweet pops up in the ICYMI section, buying followers in order to appear more influential, etc.).
I'm reminded of the dodge that religious institutions have achieved. In exchange for tax-exempt status, they are forbidden from explicit political stances and endorsements; yet in practice, many churches are highly influential in the political process, as they of course are allowed to take moral stances (abortion being the big one), and encouraging their congregations to "vote their consciences", etc.
Seems to me that Twitter advertisements would likely take the same path, where the bought political influence is instead abstracted away into generalized "awareness campaigns", push-polls, etc.
The Sierra Club has a similar “dodge.” Most non-profits are tax exempt and many have separate PACs that aren’t tax exempt but are indirectly supported by their tax-exempt cohort if only by providing a mailing list from which to solicit donations.
Yes, but making a mistake on what is and isn't adult content or people seeing it when they shouldn't or vice versa doesn't have much negative impact on society. A private company that lets political gray area ads slip through from one side, but not the other, will likely have an impact on society.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
>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.
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.
"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.
Free speech is not a minority only issue, and just about all expression is political to someone. As a heads up, there is no need to educate me on free speech expectations as they pertain to private entities versus the state, it is still reprehensible to me that people accustomed to living in a free society advocate for this kind wide-scale silencing of views they disagree with.
>it is still reprehensible to me that people accustomed to living in a free society advocate for this kind wide-scale silencing of views they disagree with.
Twitter surfaces tweets from people you're not following in their UI. You may get notified, for example, if one of the people you follow interacts with the bot's tweet.
Every time I see someone complaining about bots, its because there are a lot of likes for something they personally dislike. Not saying bots on the internet are not a problem, but I think lots of people are quick to blame bots instead of conceding that others may disagree with them. Its also virtually impossible to prove accounts as "real" or "bots" without some ID verification in place. People kinda do it via clustering/graph analysis, but I think even those are iffy at best.
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?
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Both Hirschfeld and Osborne first logged in to their accounts in February 2011, well before the first known IRA activity in 2013. WIRED’s analysis found at least 63 accounts created between 2009 and 2013 included in the list provided to Congress.
It's reasonably well known to anyone who's used the site that old accounts are fairly frequently hijacked by others, so this doesn't invalidate Twitter's claim.
There was a talk [0] at Chaos Communication Congress 2 years ago about the early "political bots hype". Sadly in german and I'm not sure how great the provided translation is. It e.g. calls out "more than 50 tweets per day" being used as criteria to identify bots and concludes with more/better research is needed. Would love to hear an updated version or something alike, if someone has recommendations.
At least it will take away the incentive from the all-powerful tech companies to stop pushing and optimizing political messages with their core-business interest. If they can't make money off of it, I'm sure these botnets will get more attention from their anti-abuse teams.
Active user totals and engagement numbers are still a big driver in valuations so the incentives still align with not cracking down too hard (as long as legitimate users aren't pushed away by the inauthentic content).
I imagine the following scenario: I'm the CEO of a social network trying to raise a new round of funding. I go to investors and say that we have 100M users on the platform and growing by 10M users per month. The investors like these numbers and decide to invest. A few years later, the investors find out that when I said 100M users, I actually meant 50M real human users and 50M bot users. When I said growing by 10M users per month, I actually meant by 5M real human users and 5M bot users per month.
They've been going after bots and sockpuppets too when they find them. Either way at least removing the ability to forcibly promote ads in front of certain groups now they have to do that targeting themselves and it's more out in the open where it can be called out unlike the ads which you wouldn't see unless you were targeted.
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
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.
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.
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".
Neither of those have to do with someone putting $500 down to run a political ad on Facebook. Local politicians, mayors, etc run political ads. Good luck policing all of that. If you block an individual from spending $500 on Facebook ads because of some law, you are violating that person's freedom of speech. That is entirely separate from campaign finance. Why stop there? Why not limit what Newspapers can say? They often get stories about politicians wrong, sometimes even in an effort to sway public opinion.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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! ”
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.
"Political advertising" may be limited to advertising that is bought for by political campaigns and PACs, which they have a previously defined policy for:
> The policy varies across markets but generally applies to ads that advocate for or against a candidate or political party, or ads by candidates and/or entities registered with their respective electoral commission.
edit: as u/ben509 pointed out, the above link only refers to political campaigns. Here's the link that defines "political content" as both campaigns and issue advocacy (at least in the U.S.)
Based on what he said, I don't think any of those will be blocked. It sounds like it's talking about campaign ads specifically, whether that's for people or issues.
I'm sure it will be better defined in the final policy.
Yeah, "political" is a weasel word like "extremist." A view I like isn't political, it's just common sense or settled science, it's the other guy's views that are "political."
Ah, the "I'm always right" argument. Settled science is an oxymoron. For 100s of years people believed things to be totally settled only for the fundamental concept to be proven false. Anyone who starts up with "settled science" is always relying on faulty reasoning.
> 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
Let's just keep in mind that Trump spent way less on the election in total than Clinton did.
Certainly with how media organizations are currently oriented and the assumption that those organizations will continue to be able to advertise or opine on candidates. But there is no definite reason that news network needs to be chasing stories 24/7 as they are now, that's a relatively new trend.
Sounds fine to me. You hold a popularity contest for the top job, the most popular person gets elected in a transparent fashion. It's very different than opaquely targeting individuals because you know what is going on and if you disagree you can do your own thing to win support.
> And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. [...] 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.
Doesn't the same argument also apply to ads in radio, TV, newspapers, mass mailing, email campaigns, and paying a guy to hand out brochures? Would you agree that it is equally bad to allow political ads in all these contexts? Genuinely curious here if the principle is meant to be applied consistently, or if the internet is different somehow.
Those advertising methods don't allow you to micro-target based on people's private behavior. Micro-targeting and machine learning lets campaigns (like Cambridge Analytica's) generate what's effectively a thousand different campaigns, targeting exactly what triggers specific people the most. There's absolutely nothing stopping them from saying the exact opposite thing to two different people. That's what our current institutions may not be prepared to handle.
the use of fake account swarms to spread political ideology seems the more powerful use of twitter than legitimate ads. will we see a correspondingly brave effort to delete fake accounts?
Twitter's entire net revenue isa small line item to google and youtube. Saying fuck you and being a small fraction of your opposition is not brave and totally useless.
Thought I don't have an objection to Twitter not accepting political advertising, their rationalization sounds like they're saying voters are too stupid to figure out what to believe so it's best if they are put in a bubble. It's interesting how closely this matches the arguments against labeling GMO foods because consumers are too stupid to decide for themselves if GMO food is harmless or not.
We love democracy. We love freedom. We love choice. But mostly in theory and not so much in practice when it comes to the masses. Anyone seen Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball hanging around?
Great. I think I already have just about all of them blocked anyway, and I only ever seem to see unsolicited ads on Twitter on my phone browser - UBlock Origin seems to be highly competent at wiping out all sponsored Tweets, root and nail, in desktop Chrome.
Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum - it's really inspiring to see a company take a stand against political advertising, if it can't be properly vetted. One more step to strengthen our democracy.
Incumbents usually have a lot more money to spend on advertising though too. On average I doubt advertising helps challengers more than incumbents (there are always edge cases of course).
It comes down to incrementality. Sure Trump has way more money than most challengers, but most people have also already made up their minds about him. His cost to acquire incremental voters is probably much higher than a lesser-known challenger.
As someone who lived through Meg Whitmans's carpet bombing when trying to win the California governorship over Jerry Brown, it's hard to believe that would matter.
For me, it just made me annoyed at Whitman.
A quick googling gave this¹ doc, that says MW spent $178.5M against $36.7M from JB. Brown won easily.
I would expect that to require an extremely huge amount of money and be impractical.
Candidates + parties + PACs + lobbying + think tanks + advocacy organizations spent $10B in 2018 in the US, whereas the US almond industry made $12B in 2018. So I expect political spending to not be able to change ad prices very much compared to commercial ad spending.
Yeah I very much doubt Trump is wasting his money bidding on impressions for people likely to support Democrats (assuming he can accurately mimic the dems’ targeting) just to slightly raise the cost of Democratic campaigns
The research shows - contrary to common wisdom - that money only helps a campaign until it's reached all reachable voters with their message. After that, more spending does not matter.
It's true that (A) the candidate with the most money (B) usually wins, but that doesn't mean A causes B. It's more likely that the most popular candidate attracts both the most money and the most votes, simply by being more popular.
I have a hard time buying into that contrarian view in a post-Cambridge Analytica world. If anything, it feels like whataboutism to me. While Twitter is trying to deal with the mass corruption of democracy around the world from micro-targeted lies, they want to talk about some kid's high school student president campaign.
Speaking of 'Paying for reach'. The Supreme Court said (in 2014) there should be no limit on how much an individual can contribute to campaigns (money that is used to buy reach) - And Corporations are legal persons - so...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/us/politics/supreme-court...
Those pesky Americans with their free speech... doesn’t anyone here see what this really is about? The elites have lost control of the narrative so they are doing what all elites do in a time of crisis: ban it all. Shut up you mere mortals and go back to doing what you’re told and thinking what we want you to think.
Well this sort of underscores the problem with this approach — who exactly is an elite? What exactly is political? We can’t even agree yet we think Twitter is going to be better at it than us? If it were up to me, I would design the platform as one in which all messages including those with mail-intent were allowed. Then I’d enable the client software to decide based on user preferences. Having a centralized scrutinizer is just a recipe for bad Ju-ju.
(I didn't downvote you but) I think the "elites" are the ones who most abuse the right to free speech, by controlling mass media and the public narrative, as well as conflating political contributions as "speech". Money talks.
When Jack says:
> 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.
Paying for reach and political influence has already pushed democracy to the breaking point. The symptoms are everywhere, from the appalling state of public healthcare, to regulatory capture in virtually every industry, especially financial. The "elites" are not a single group, but a fractured one with varying interests vying for power - but they do have one thing in common, which is using money as speech to control the narrative.
Thank you for not down voting me — but I’d love you just the same if you did. I find it difficult to rebut the argument you present with the following exception: in the US we have several hundred years of rigorous iteration in our legal system with respect to what is and what isn’t protected speech. For twitter to decide now and it this juncture that the speech it most dislikes is x, something about that doesn’t sit well. That said there’s long been an odd relationship between campaign spending and the media. Many local newsroom’s entire budgets depend on election years and yet we are supposed to believe they’re impartial. So I get that there’s a principle involved in this decision that they simply aren’t going to be like the local newsroom. That’s what they say... but who is going to watchdog this policy to make sure it really works like that and who is going to even notice when they inevitably make decisions that go beyond the criteria initially laid out? Seems to me rather than being a principled stand this is simply a way for them to create an ever shifting rule set to promote the speech they like while silencing speech they disagree with.
That sounds sensible, and I'd agree with you that Twitter's decision does raise questions about who gets to decide what's allowed to have "reach".
I suppose your parent comment sounded a bit too incendiary for civilized discussion. It did seem somewhat reductionist to say the "elites" are banning free speech to control the narrative.
It's possible that Twitter is biased in favor of certain political leanings; it could be that this decision is not as altruistic as it sounds; maybe there are hidden (or even unconscious) political motives. And, as you pointed out, there's no saying what may happen in the future, when someone else is in charge of the company. I think these are valid questions about the power they have to shape the public narrative, at least in their sphere of influence.
For me at least, I'd like to give Jack the benefit of the doubt and take his words and this decision as an honest effort in trying to be a responsible social media company.
>> It did seem somewhat reductionist to say the "elites" are banning free speech to control the narrative.
Here’s a hypothetical to illustrate how this makes sense in my view: the incumbent is always going to control the lions share of the so called free media. Two or three elections cycles ago, the average campaign didn’t know about a/b testing much less how to leverage social to level the playing field. Now everyone knows... now the incumbent no longer has the home field advantage... except.. twitter just changed the rules. One less platform that the challenger can leverage to play up to the incumbent. And let’s see, everyone thinks Jack is great so maybe some of the other platforms follow on... now technology is basically useless for the challenger.. so we are back to the old system where the incumbent takes the free media attention. A return to the status quo. Now why would social media have an interest in that? Oh I don’t know why does anyone have an interest in seeing entrenched politicians staying in power and yet that’s the system we’ve made for ourselves... oh I know pac money / citizens united are all code for republican money so I’m sure a lot of the commentators on here are thinking this will suppress that because that is the “only people who buy political ads” these days... but I’d ask you this - what if some challenger out there might have a chance of flipping a red state and changing the composition of the senate in 2020... except now one of the tools they could have used just disappeared... how do you feel now? Maybe political ads aren’t so bad if they keep incumbents from sticking around so long.
I hear you about the potential downsides and consequences of Twitter banning political advertising, one of which might be that incumbents have lost a platform to rally support.
On the other hand, this ban affects those in power as well - and it might be argued that they're the ones who disproportionately spend and have reach on social media. So I find it hard to imagine that this decision was conspired to suppress those who challenge the status quo.
I suppose we'll have to see how it turns out. Maybe incumbents have more of a chance, if they didn't have to compete on ad spending, but instead on "organic reach" of genuine supporters.
I'm a cynic, and skeptical of politics in general (with good reason, based on study of its shameful history..) but there's a stubborn optimist in there who wants to believe humanity - even the "elites", at least a few souls - have a shred of goodness and hope left to turn things around.
I wonder about this point. The universal declaration of human rights even mentions this in article 19, but few countries seem to actually uphold that value.
Given that practically for any issue of importance there's enough money on each side of the issue to buy a campaign on Twitter, it doesn't really matter. But if Twitter doesn't want to take money that would expose them to pressure over banning somebody's political speech (somehow nowadays it became ok in the US of A to call to ban your political opponent from speaking - who could have known that'd happen?) - it can be a sensible solution. Twitter would still be pressured to ban for politics (and probably would yield to that pressure, as it did many times before) but at least their revenue department would be kept out of this mess.
Years ago I ran across a quote that went something like "Freedom of Speech gives you the right to own a printing press, not the right to use mine." I wish I could track down who said it.
That's basically what Jack is saying too. I don't see how "Freedom of the Press" could be construed to mean that publishers are obligated to run any ad that somebody is willing to pay for. That's never been the case.
You're absolutely right. There's a fine and subtle distinction to be made here - Freedom of the Press preserve the right of someone to seek to pay for reach for their expression and the right of those with reach to sell it.
As you say, this does not oblige anyone with a press to use it for any given person's benefit.
It just means that the basic concept of paying for expression and to expose other people to it is something baked into the First Amendment. Just not the Speech Clause.
I just found the perfect way to sum this all up and I'm making a prediction: NRA ads will be banned on twitter but Planned Parenthood ads will not. The total lack of self reflection and thinking on part of Twitter is really something else. Facebook made the right decision, Twitter made the wrong decision. It cannot be more obvious.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility.
I'm still kind of amazed that the government hasn't cracked down on bitcoin miners for hosting child pornography yet; every full node is hosting it. If the government ever wants to crack down on blockchains they have a valid legal excuse. The longer they go without cracking down, the more it seems like we as a society are accepting the existence of a censorship free medium of communication.
I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.
> I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.
How are those companies going to make money from hosting tweets? Are you letting blockchain hosts inject things? If so that's a security & privacy nightmare just waiting to happen. If not, it's financially insane to host it unless twitter pays people to do so. And if they do that then hey they're simply contractors for twitter, and twitter is again bearing the full burden of responsibility.
The same question can be asked of Twitter. Twitter serves up other content alongside tweets, and makes a profit doing it (as of last year). Is this a privacy nightmare? Yup. Is it more of a privacy nightmare if a different company does it? Depends on the company. Maybe a given user will trust a given provider more than they trust Twitter, or maybe they'll like their ad policy more, or maybe they'll be willing to pay a premium to not be served ads, or maybe they'll want to search through tweets using more specific filters than Twitter allows. To me, choice of provider sounds like something that should increase security for those who desire it and educate themselves. For those who don't, there are other tradeoffs they can make.
This all assumes I'm interpretting Dorsey's statements correctly, and of course I may not be.
> Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost
Why do you assume that? Modern blockchains are not proof-of-work, and the only info you need on a blockchain are permissions and encryption keys to data on other distributed storage networks (e.g, IPFS.)
So the cost isn't really very high, and probably worth the tradeoff for groups that feel alienated or disenfranchised.
Modern blockchains don't host images and face twitter's level of traffic, either.
Bandwidth & storage isn't free. Why would anyone voluntarily just do that for Twitter? Even if it's literally entirely free to setup & host, that's still someone's time & motivation to do so. People do this for blockchain because they're trying to get rich off of it. There's no money in hosting tweets.
Yeah, but then they could be ordered to take it down. I think the idea is to be censorship resistant in such a way that the company itself cannot make exceptions when pressured by a court, but I'm forgetting if that's me reading between the lines or if Dorsey explicitly talks about censorship resistance.
Telling the government "I know you've told me to take it down, but we specifically designed it in such a way that we can't take it down" sounds like an incredibly good legal strategy that will definitely not backfire.
So far, the "we can't do that" defense has worked for companies that provide E2E encryption. The government may change the rules, of course; they keep talking about it.
I guarantee you that if you tell a judge you can't take something down "because you use blockchain" the judge will not care and just sanction your company.
To the degree that you provide a service the courts can order you not to provide it. If you've built something which makes it necessary to remove all content to remove any content, that's on you.
My impression of Dorsey is that he doesn't really know anything but me makes statements (like the OP, and the Bitcoin gunk, and making Twitter more "conversational") that don't make sense or stand up to scrutiny, but use a bunch of words that try to convey a position of leadership on not topics.
From what I recall in the JRE and Sam Harris interviews, Jack seemed very reasonable. I think Twitter is something that's gotten away from him (certainly from what he'd like) and is being run by the inmates to a significant degree.
That was my impression as well. It was interesting to see Jack answer and then have the legal council (?) amend Jack's answers or push them in a specific direction. It's very clear that there is a mismatch between what Jack wants, what Twitter shareholders want, and what Twitter's activist pseudo-employee contingent wants.
Unsure if you’re asking who is running twitter or what’s meant by ‘inmates’ so will attempt to answer both.
I suspect it’s marketing people / short-sighted profit minded people rather than the legal team running the place.
And if you are asking about inmates meaning, it’s an idiom, “the inmates are running the asylum” meaning the least useful/knowledgeable people have taken over from the competent.
Dorsey espouses some very libertarian views and yet he's generally leaning left of course. Still , he s the only one who dares give Trump a megaphone. I think he handles the whole situation exceptionally well.
However shouldn’t the president have a “megaphone?” In the old days, when a president spoke, the media would “interpret” what he said. Politicians being able to speak directly to the population is a good thing.
I like that politicians can speak directly to the media—I just wish orgs like Twitter would apply their rules and guidelines fairly to everyone.
I'm starting to see these "rules" more like "laws," and starting to look more closely at how some of these platforms are governed in the same way I look at how governments are governed:
- Who makes the laws?
- How does one become a lawmaker?
- How long can one be a lawmaker?
- Who enforces the laws?
- How strong is the rule of law?
- What are the consequences of breaking a law?
- etc etc.
> Dorsey espouses some very libertarian views and yet he's generally leaning left of course
Since the left has a embraced intersectionality, you can't be a "libertarian" and lean "left", that's completely incompatible, or I'm not sure what left you are talking about. That Dorsey puts up a facade because he lives in the silicon valley? sure, just like the higher ups at Alphabet.
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.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadFacebook is taking the safer position in this case, IMO, from a legal/regulatory perspective. It'll be interesting to see what shakes out.
Did you cut the cable years ago? I think perhaps you've forgotten how bad some political ads on TV are.
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.
Since when?
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.
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.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952
There's no need to insult every single Twitter user like that :-)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=morse.vedppa.a...
Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO
1:05 PM · Oct 30, 2019
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1189634360472829952.html
--------------------------------------------------------
We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
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.
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.
These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.
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! ”
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.
We’re well aware we‘re a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.
In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.
We’ll share the final policy by 11/15, including a few exceptions (ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed, for instance). We’ll start enforcing our new policy on 11/22 to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change goes into effect.
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.
It's kind of horrifying that one can make such a statement, acknowledging the dangers of advertising, but still insinuating that commercial advertising somehow isn't dangerous and harmful, just the political ads...
And precisely for that reason, it is dangerous ;)
Whenever you see an ad, remember that they've diverted funds from improving the quality of their product and paying their workers well, and instead decided to use that money to try to deceive and manipulate the public into forming a positive impression.
savage
On edge cases time will work out standards, that's what these companies ought to employ humans for.
Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?
This is going to be s can of worms.
Once you start paying for ads you are an organization.
Still, I think they're now in a better spot than Facebook.
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?
If the thing/person being promoted can be voted on/in, it's a political ad.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985
A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following:
> You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple.
Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.
Using "scale" as an out doesn't fly. Sometimes you have to cut back on growth and/or scale to do the right thing. No human review clearly hasn't worked, so either automate or get humans in there. More likely, start with the latter and replace with the former over time.
Automating can help with the more obvious stuff, but there are many ways it can fail in either direction. For example, failing to detect hate-speech dog whistles, or inadvertently suppressing ads from minorities where the language patterns fall outside of what it sees as "the norm".
Anyway, like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you. These systems definitely need considerable improvement, but doing that isn't as trivial as it may at first seem.
Even if they lose money by manually reviewing a small ad that was flagged as possibly political, it doesn't mean it costs more to review 1/100 low-volume ads. They're also paying to classify useful data to train their model.
For example, Facebook crawls links sent in messenger. [0]
No source, but I believe the major advertising platforms, e.g. Google Ads are doing this today to check for banned content.
Facebook could build a heuristic of banned pages & not allow ads to be published. Humans could manually verify things at the edges.
There is a whole industry called link cloaking, that shows the crawlers a sanitized page, and the human targets the actual landing page.
It's a cat & mouse game between ad publishers & blackhats, often times foreign nationals outside of US jurisdiction.
I'm trying to think through the scenarios where a political campaign might use blackhat techniques to subvert verification crawls, and it's not clear that it would stop all cases, but I believe it would stop most.
Political campaigns could use the Facebook accounts & payment information of foreign nationals to temporarily push ads until they were reported - would the liability of blowback be enough to prevent it?
[0] https://twitter.com/vah_13/status/1187755829371555840
Fine:
Donate to fight cancer
Not fine:
Donate to Candidate X to support cancer research
I also donate to ACLU, but you have to be willfully obtuse to not accept that it predominately backs left-leaning policy viewpoints, and vocally so — again, fundamentally political in nature.
PP can as well. They can't say "vote pro-choice" but can advertise that they provide women's health services including abortions.
Basically: you can talk about what you do that isn't related to elections or votes in congress.
So in your example, I think it's absolutely clear to most adult Americans what "Donate now" means. It means "Donate now so that we can fight for your gun rights" or "Donate now so that we can fight for a free and open internet".
I do worry that Twitter is just ratcheting up the difficulty they're already facing with political speech on the platform.
Ultimately, every position you can possibly advocate - including the position that you want people to purchase something or donate to someone - has packaged with it some vision of how society might best operate. In other words: in a society where decisions are made in a political way (which is a good thing), every message is political. Every message.
https://deadspin.com/by-banning-protest-signs-mls-is-trying-...
This is a problem I have with modern social movements, when they fail to get audiences in public spaces they seek out captive audiences or to be disruptive as possible to completely unrelated places. Hold your rally in a park or march down main street or a pedestrian way or in front of some place you're protesting. Stop walking down highways and forcing your messages in places which have nothing to do with your cause.
It doesn't really seem like MLK's Selma to Montgomery march or Ghandi's Salt March would've passed this smell test.
Absolutely. So let's get rid of advertising at games. Not just political advertising; all advertising. No Democratic or Republican ads, but also no Toyota or Chrysler ads, no Coors or Bud Light ads. Unfortunately, there's too much money at stake for that to ever happen.
But political ads are different. I don't think Coors drinkers get offended when they see a Bud Light ad.
Sports isn't something people need. Some sports leagues cost a lot of resources to run. If these sports leagues become less profitable, then some of the investment will move into other entertainment and your sports professional league will slowly disappear.
But I agree, without advertisements, professional sports would not survive, so it's not going to happen.
Companies that buy advertising at games pay a pretty penny for it. Fans who buy tickets to games have paid to watch the game, not to advertise their cause. If fans want to advertise at games, they can pay the advertising rate.
that said, just because a product is free doesn't mean ads aren't "selling" it, which exposes the flaw in my criteria: if you're selling a political product, an ad can both be trying to sell a product and be a political ad at the same time.
Seems to me that Twitter advertisements would likely take the same path, where the bought political influence is instead abstracted away into generalized "awareness campaigns", push-polls, etc.
Politics don't go away just because you ontologize them as "private sector".
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.
>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.
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.
(calculated from https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2019/05/why-facebook-con...)
So not a lot, but still it's 1%
The vocal minority would never let this happen as they would take it as being silenced for their views.
I absolutely agree with you.
Twitter surfaces tweets from people you're not following in their UI. You may get notified, for example, if one of the people you follow interacts with the bot's tweet.
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.
They are real people, aren't they?
to who?
The entrenched who already have a mass information platform available to them (news).
I shouldn't have to google for someone as politically active... ...you're literally working to elect someone president.
Both Hirschfeld and Osborne first logged in to their accounts in February 2011, well before the first known IRA activity in 2013. WIRED’s analysis found at least 63 accounts created between 2009 and 2013 included in the list provided to Congress.
It's reasonably well known to anyone who's used the site that old accounts are fairly frequently hijacked by others, so this doesn't invalidate Twitter's claim.
[0] https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9268-social_bots_fake_news_und_f...
He controls it all
I imagine the following scenario: I'm the CEO of a social network trying to raise a new round of funding. I go to investors and say that we have 100M users on the platform and growing by 10M users per month. The investors like these numbers and decide to invest. A few years later, the investors find out that when I said 100M users, I actually meant 50M real human users and 50M bot users. When I said growing by 10M users per month, I actually meant by 5M real human users and 5M bot users per month.
At what point does this become criminal fraud?
It’s not hard to ask.
He’s blocking that too
Banning political ads is crucial linchpin to getting money out of politics.
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
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".
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.
> 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.
I don't think they will. 'Politicians ban' will be equivalent to banning free expression, and twitter is against that.
So? We can address that when we get there. This is a step in the right direction for once.
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.
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! ”
https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...
> The policy varies across markets but generally applies to ads that advocate for or against a candidate or political party, or ads by candidates and/or entities registered with their respective electoral commission.
edit: as u/ben509 pointed out, the above link only refers to political campaigns. Here's the link that defines "political content" as both campaigns and issue advocacy (at least in the U.S.)
https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...
https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...
I'm sure it will be better defined in the final policy.
And common sense. common to whom?
Let's just keep in mind that Trump spent way less on the election in total than Clinton did.
Doesn't the same argument also apply to ads in radio, TV, newspapers, mass mailing, email campaigns, and paying a guy to hand out brochures? Would you agree that it is equally bad to allow political ads in all these contexts? Genuinely curious here if the principle is meant to be applied consistently, or if the internet is different somehow.
We love democracy. We love freedom. We love choice. But mostly in theory and not so much in practice when it comes to the masses. Anyone seen Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball hanging around?
In fairness Twitter has been public since 2013 and in that time only turned a profit in 1 year.
These ads wouldn't make or break them, and its far more valuable to get the PR while FB is in the media for the same issue.
The incumbents are already known. Challengers have to make themselves known, and paid advertising is one of the main ways that is possible.
For me, it just made me annoyed at Whitman.
A quick googling gave this¹ doc, that says MW spent $178.5M against $36.7M from JB. Brown won easily.
¹ https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...
Candidates + parties + PACs + lobbying + think tanks + advocacy organizations spent $10B in 2018 in the US, whereas the US almond industry made $12B in 2018. So I expect political spending to not be able to change ad prices very much compared to commercial ad spending.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
It's true that (A) the candidate with the most money (B) usually wins, but that doesn't mean A causes B. It's more likely that the most popular candidate attracts both the most money and the most votes, simply by being more popular.
Only one country has the first amendment, and this decision from twitter is globally applicable, so it shouldn't factor into the decision.
When Jack says:
> 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.
Paying for reach and political influence has already pushed democracy to the breaking point. The symptoms are everywhere, from the appalling state of public healthcare, to regulatory capture in virtually every industry, especially financial. The "elites" are not a single group, but a fractured one with varying interests vying for power - but they do have one thing in common, which is using money as speech to control the narrative.
I suppose your parent comment sounded a bit too incendiary for civilized discussion. It did seem somewhat reductionist to say the "elites" are banning free speech to control the narrative.
It's possible that Twitter is biased in favor of certain political leanings; it could be that this decision is not as altruistic as it sounds; maybe there are hidden (or even unconscious) political motives. And, as you pointed out, there's no saying what may happen in the future, when someone else is in charge of the company. I think these are valid questions about the power they have to shape the public narrative, at least in their sphere of influence.
For me at least, I'd like to give Jack the benefit of the doubt and take his words and this decision as an honest effort in trying to be a responsible social media company.
Here’s a hypothetical to illustrate how this makes sense in my view: the incumbent is always going to control the lions share of the so called free media. Two or three elections cycles ago, the average campaign didn’t know about a/b testing much less how to leverage social to level the playing field. Now everyone knows... now the incumbent no longer has the home field advantage... except.. twitter just changed the rules. One less platform that the challenger can leverage to play up to the incumbent. And let’s see, everyone thinks Jack is great so maybe some of the other platforms follow on... now technology is basically useless for the challenger.. so we are back to the old system where the incumbent takes the free media attention. A return to the status quo. Now why would social media have an interest in that? Oh I don’t know why does anyone have an interest in seeing entrenched politicians staying in power and yet that’s the system we’ve made for ourselves... oh I know pac money / citizens united are all code for republican money so I’m sure a lot of the commentators on here are thinking this will suppress that because that is the “only people who buy political ads” these days... but I’d ask you this - what if some challenger out there might have a chance of flipping a red state and changing the composition of the senate in 2020... except now one of the tools they could have used just disappeared... how do you feel now? Maybe political ads aren’t so bad if they keep incumbents from sticking around so long.
On the other hand, this ban affects those in power as well - and it might be argued that they're the ones who disproportionately spend and have reach on social media. So I find it hard to imagine that this decision was conspired to suppress those who challenge the status quo.
I suppose we'll have to see how it turns out. Maybe incumbents have more of a chance, if they didn't have to compete on ad spending, but instead on "organic reach" of genuine supporters.
I'm a cynic, and skeptical of politics in general (with good reason, based on study of its shameful history..) but there's a stubborn optimist in there who wants to believe humanity - even the "elites", at least a few souls - have a shred of goodness and hope left to turn things around.
Do you think other countries don't have freedom of speech or freedom of the press?
I am not an American, and to me this comes across as either absurdity or corruption.
>Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people to peaceably assemble...
Press is pay to express. Only difference is the scale and price.
Are there any other companies?
Freedom of the Press has always been about expression and the ability to pay for reach. Printing presses were - and are - horrendously expensive.
That's basically what Jack is saying too. I don't see how "Freedom of the Press" could be construed to mean that publishers are obligated to run any ad that somebody is willing to pay for. That's never been the case.
As you say, this does not oblige anyone with a press to use it for any given person's benefit.
It just means that the basic concept of paying for expression and to expose other people to it is something baked into the First Amendment. Just not the Speech Clause.
Perhaps this will disincentivize investment in electoral politics, but it won't rescue the public discourse from financiers' influence.
[0]: https://youtu.be/_mP9OmOFxc4a
[1]: https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ
[2]: https://talesfromthecrypt.libsyn.com/tales-from-the-crypt-61...
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."
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.
I'm still kind of amazed that the government hasn't cracked down on bitcoin miners for hosting child pornography yet; every full node is hosting it. If the government ever wants to crack down on blockchains they have a valid legal excuse. The longer they go without cracking down, the more it seems like we as a society are accepting the existence of a censorship free medium of communication.
I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.
How are those companies going to make money from hosting tweets? Are you letting blockchain hosts inject things? If so that's a security & privacy nightmare just waiting to happen. If not, it's financially insane to host it unless twitter pays people to do so. And if they do that then hey they're simply contractors for twitter, and twitter is again bearing the full burden of responsibility.
This all assumes I'm interpretting Dorsey's statements correctly, and of course I may not be.
Why do you assume that? Modern blockchains are not proof-of-work, and the only info you need on a blockchain are permissions and encryption keys to data on other distributed storage networks (e.g, IPFS.)
So the cost isn't really very high, and probably worth the tradeoff for groups that feel alienated or disenfranchised.
Bandwidth & storage isn't free. Why would anyone voluntarily just do that for Twitter? Even if it's literally entirely free to setup & host, that's still someone's time & motivation to do so. People do this for blockchain because they're trying to get rich off of it. There's no money in hosting tweets.
Yes, that is the point. Making censorship more difficult is one of the main goals of blockchain technology.
When was the last time that a court successfully reversed a transaction on the Bitcoin Blockchain? The answer is never.
Sure, they have sent court orders to companies, or whatever, but the blockchain itself has never been reversed by court order.
To the degree that you provide a service the courts can order you not to provide it. If you've built something which makes it necessary to remove all content to remove any content, that's on you.
But this announcement is absolutely stellar. Who knows if Harris influenced him ;-)
I suspect it’s marketing people / short-sighted profit minded people rather than the legal team running the place.
And if you are asking about inmates meaning, it’s an idiom, “the inmates are running the asylum” meaning the least useful/knowledgeable people have taken over from the competent.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the+inmates+are+running...
I think inmates would be a good dysphemism for the legal department too.
I'm starting to see these "rules" more like "laws," and starting to look more closely at how some of these platforms are governed in the same way I look at how governments are governed:
- Who makes the laws? - How does one become a lawmaker? - How long can one be a lawmaker? - Who enforces the laws? - How strong is the rule of law? - What are the consequences of breaking a law? - etc etc.
How does this analogy sit with you?
Since the left has a embraced intersectionality, you can't be a "libertarian" and lean "left", that's completely incompatible, or I'm not sure what left you are talking about. That Dorsey puts up a facade because he lives in the silicon valley? sure, just like the higher ups at Alphabet.
Words clearly do not have meanings anymore