What the commentators said

Twitter’s ban won’t make much difference to British politics, said Liam Mcloughlin on

The Conversation. In the last election the Tories, who spent £2.1m with Facebook, spent just £25,000 on Twitter ads; Labour just £6,767. And in any case, the parties can simply move their political Twitter custom to Facebook and other social platforms, said Robin Pagnamenta in The Daily Telegraph. They’ll also take a leaf out of Donald Trump’s playbook, and send out messages they hope will go viral without having to pay for them. The Tories have even recruited a New Zealand-based consultancy to run “a 24-hour meme factory”. The parties know this election will be fought and won online: so stand by “for a digital election blitz”.

Nor is Twitter’s ban the great force for good in US politics that Democrats are making it out to be, said Shannon C. McGregor in The Guardian. It won’t do anything to rein in Trump: as so many of his tweets become news, “he really doesn’t need Twitter ads”. What it will do, however, is ruin the prospects of political newcomers: they rely on Twitter ads, which are far cheaper than TV ads, for cheap access to millions of voters. This ban is a great PR success for Twitter, which has used it to occupy the moral high ground and back Facebook into a moral corner, but it entrenches the power of established political groups. Besides, “I favour more political speech, not less”, said Ellen L. Weintraub, chair of the Federal Election Commission, in The Washington Post. And political advertising “is an important part of our political discourse”. Jack Dorsey is right to identify the challenge that internet ads present to that discourse. But killing them off isn’t the way to go about it. The real problem for democracy is the micro-targeting: it allows disinformation and discord to be spread unchallenged because it’s under the radar. It allows no possibility of what the Supreme Court calls “counterspeech”. Eliminating political ad micro-targeting, not the ads themselves – that’s where salvation lies.