The Twitter ban
Responding to the increasingly fierce attacks on social media platforms for spreading political disinformation, Twitter last week announced that it would no longer be accepting paid political advertising. Political advertising “brings significant risks to politics”, said Twitter’s chief executive Jack Dorsey, who also expressed alarm that millions of voters are being “micro-targeted” with “unchecked, misleading information”. The worldwide ban applies to paid advertising by political candidates and also to paid ads for political causes.
Twitter’s move very deliberately sets the company at odds with Facebook which, far from banning them, announced last month that it would no longer be checking political ads for accuracy. The decision provoked a storm of criticism in the US Congress, but last week Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reaffirmed the new policy, saying it was based on the “right to free expression”.
What the editorials said
Full marks to Twitter for putting its “social responsibilities” above profit, said The Boston Globe. If only Facebook would follow its lead. A congressional inquiry found that in the 2016 presidential election, over 11 million of Facebook’s US users were exposed to ads paid for by Russia. For Zuckerberg to claim that policing its ads for accuracy amounts to censorship is a “cop-out”. Social media giants are “making a mockery of accountability”, agreed The Times. Using their micro-targeting algorithms, they can disseminate their clients’ misinformation to a targeted group without fear of reprisal – or even discovery. Who but the targeted voters knew, for example, that Labour had claimed in a Facebook ad last week that the Tories planned to bring back fox-hunting?
But Dorsey’s ban on political ads carries dangers of its own, said the San Francisco Chronicle. Judging whether an ad for a given cause is “political”, for example, is itself a political judgement. Will a Planned Parenthood ad be filed under “political” or under “public health”? A ban turns out to be far more of a minefield than it may first appear.