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Twitter to ban all political advertising
Twitter is to ban all political advertising worldwide, saying that the reach of such messages "should be earned, not bought". "While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics," company CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted.
Social media rival Facebook recently ruled out a ban on political ads.
News of the ban divided America's political camps for the 2020 election. Brad Parscale, manager of President Donald Trump's re-election campaign, said the ban was "yet another attempt by the left to silence Trump and conservatives". But Bill Russo, spokesman for the campaign to elect Democratic front-runner Joe Biden, said: "When faced with a choice between ad dollars and the integrity of our democracy, it is encouraging that, for once, revenue did not win out."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01 2019, @01:24AM (2 children)
Too late.
We let them in, this will continue. There is today no way to distinguish some marketing campaigns from a real bottom-top movements, which are usually taken down a bit quicker. And things come not only through robots from ad companies, also from bio-robots.
And don't make me laugh with this "leftism! leftism!". Have you ever seen a true left-side politician without corporation and general business nationalization in their program? Which company wants to be nationalized? They would not advertise a left-wing politicians no matter what.
The "leftism" is like a typical movie villain. It is made to create some enemy, but the true intention is to format (yes, as we format media) an universal ad receiving customer which would not complain except in cases in which paid agencies want it to. This way it is possible to create, and stuff in, even the most stupid products.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01 2019, @07:20AM (1 child)
Leftism doesn't get rid of capitalism. It just changes the currency from the dollar to an invisible currency of government favor. These companies already have billions of the dollar currency, now they're just working on accumulating the government currency whose value is growing at an exponential pace.
Ask a poor urban individual his views on most significant political topics and you're not going to get an especially refined response. They "ain't got time for dat shit." Their political views tend to be pretty simple and short term. One group promises to give them free stuff right now, the other group doesn't. Why do you think the DNC is teasing reparations? It's a completely legal way to buy votes -- even better, without even spending a dime of your own money. Sadly that increasing lack of political knowledge or interest applies not just to these groups, but they're important for another reason. This is the US birthrate by income. Those earning $200k. We are currently, quite literally, breeding support for leftism. And poor births also come at a much earlier age meaning an even higher effective reproduction rate. If that's not intuitive imagine one group having their children at age 20 versus another group having them at age 200. Even with the exact same fertility rate, you'd have a radically different 'reproduction rate'.
And so, unless something radically changes, fairly extreme liberalism is likely to, sooner or later, dominate the US political scene. I don't think these companies' pandering is any sort of a shadowy conspiracy or anything, just an acknowledgment of this reality. As you go further left the government increasingly becomes the entity that decide which companies and individuals win, and which lose. By aligning themselves with the government at a relatively early stage, these companies are doing little more than investing in their own future. Facebook may head the ministry of Communication, Google the Ministry of Information, Twitter the Ministry of Propaganda.
It's ironic. It's completely understandable why people evangelize for leftism. I mock the urban voter there, but it's easy to see and empathize that they feel wronged by a society where it's not easy to reach the top. Yet they end up advocating for a system where not only does "hard" become "impossible", but one where the bottom -where they will remain- tend to be vastly worse off than before. Stalin and Mao strove to create communist nations. But, as always in these systems, some people are more equal than others. Even as tens of millions of people starved to death in their brave new worlds, the politburo feasted. And the people manning that politburo are, and will be, the very people that individuals think they're fighting against in advocating for a leftist system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01 2019, @02:02PM
Rather both, left and right side, became their marketing versions of the same thing: Corporation government. There is no more "right" and "left".
Left without nationalization of private property (or means of production), but with companies creating more and more needs to have useless property (yes, you read right: Left-wing politics and praising the property).
Right without anti-foreign elements in the citizen level, only in the marketing from companies who get along with Chinese censorship for more money (yes, you read right: right-wing politics and tolerance for racially problematic elements).
This is not a politics discourse at all, this is a worthless show for advertisement. Does not matter what "wing" you choose, you have chosen corporation. So don't expect that people have no opinions and solutions if their political opinions became washed to the same thing sold in different packages.
It reminds me a picture I've seen in some meat shop: "Sausage: Pork with chicken" and "Chicken with pork" on the same shelf. These were of course the same sausages, and there was more clay in them than both pork and chicken.
The true "left" and "right" views are there, but they're "fnord'ed" by the "terrorist" meme.