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Twitter Bans Political Advertising

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday October 31 2019, @03:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the internet-echo-chamber dept.

takyon writes:

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."

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01 2019, @06:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01 2019, @06:04AM (#914480)

    It's much worse than even that.

    Twitter could not reject right leaning advertising while rejecting left leaning advertising. The reason is because it's directly provable with no plausible deniability in their motives whatsoever. By contrast when banning individuals or other social style messaging, they can appeal to violations of their terms and services which are vague enough to justify banning anybody. As a result Twitter can, and does, ban socially driven political messaging that they disapprove of. They are even more active in preventing things they disagree with from trending which is done entirely opaquely. And so long as they occasionally do a token ban of some radical left individual, they can get away with arbitrary restrictions on the other side of the aisle since they have plausible deniability.

    So, in other words, what this does is effectively give Twitter the right to censor political advertising they disagree with, and promote those that they agree with. All while pretending to be impartial. Expect to see an identical ban pass on Facebook before year's end. The only reason it's not happening simultaneously is, again, some plausible deniability of collusion.