Twitter Stops Accepting Political Advertising
Twitter is banning all political advertising from its site. It is a largely meaningless decision, but it's still a bad idea.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey made a big deal yesterday in announcing that the social media site would not accept political advertising during the 2020 Presidential campaign:
Twitter on Wednesday said it would ban all advertisements about political candidates, elections and hot-button policy issues such as abortion and immigration, a significant shift that comes in response to growing concerns that politicians are seizing on the vast reach of social media to deceive voters ahead of the 2020 election.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced the move in a series of tweets, stressing that paying for political speech has the effect of “forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people.” The ban marks a break with Twitter’s social media peers, Facebook and Google-owned YouTube, which have defended their policies on political ads in recent weeks.
“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,” Dorsey said.
Twitter’s announcement covers ads intended to influence elections, including ballot measures, as well as those that address “issues of national importance.” The new rules will be applied globally, published by mid-November and take effect later in the month, Dorsey said.
The change drew a mixed reception, with some critics highlighting that it would not affect what users can tweet and share on their own. Teddy Goff, who served as President Obama’s digital director in 2012 and as senior adviser to Hillary Clinton in 2016, said any update by Twitter that does not address the “organic and algorithmic spread of hate speech and discrimination and dishonesty” is insufficient.
The political ad ban also might not have much impact on widely followed accounts, including President Trump’s, whose tweets already reach more than 66 million users each day. Some critics, including Democrats, have urged Twitter to block or remove the commander in chief’s tweets, arguing that his comments are incendiary or incorrect. Twitter has declined to take action, beyond stressing some narrow cases in which it would limit the reach of tweets from a head of state.
Still, the decision illustrates a sharp symbolic rift between Dorsey and one of his peers, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who on Wednesday stood by his company’s controversial policy that essentially allows politicians to lie in ads during the tech giant’s third-quarter earnings call.
“In a democracy, I don’t think it’s right for private companies to censor politicians or the news,” Zuckerberg said.
The controversy first arose earlier this month, when former vice president Joe Biden, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for the White House, asked Facebook to remove a Trump campaign ad that contained multiple falsehoods. Facebook declined, prompting backlash from other 2020 contenders.
In response, Zuckerberg has defended the policy in recent weeks, stressing that the tech giant should not stand in the way of political leaders’ speech. During the earnings call, he estimated that political advertising next year would make up about 0.5 percent of Facebook’s revenue. Based on the company’s 2018 revenue, that would amount to $279 million. Facebook’s revenue next year is expected to be billions of dollars higher.
(…)
Political advertising has long been a thorny issue for Silicon Valley, a potential profit windfall that has come at steep costs in recent years. During the 2016 election, agents tied to the Russian government purchased promoted tweets and other forms of online ads as part of their campaign to stoke political discord, promote then-candidate Trump and undermine Democratic contender Clinton, according to congressional investigators.
Regulators responded by lambasting social media sites for failing to spot such efforts by a foreign power to interfere in U.S. elections, and the pressure resulted in major changes — including efforts by Twitter and others to more clearly label political ads, verify the people purchasing them and cache them for the public to view. Still, legislators threatened to pass new laws, arguing that online ads were subject to far fewer, less restrictive rules than broadcast television.
(…)
In his tweets, Dorsey on Wednesday endorsed those calls for new federal rules.
“Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough,” he said. “The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.”
Daniel Kreiss, a professor of media and journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, expressed some early concern that Twitter’s decision to ban political ads could spell particular trouble for down-ballot candidates with smaller followings online. Twitter ads, he said, are “one of the ways that candidates get their message in front of a public whose attention is extremely divided and fragmented.”
Philip Bump, citing the relatively minor role that Twitter plays in the online advertising world, isn’t impressed:
There are a lot of reasons that political campaigns might prefer to advertise on networks belonging to Facebook or Google than on Twitter. Both Facebook and Google have broader reach than Twitter and are used by more Americans. Twitter users tend to be younger and wealthier than Americans overall, but that’s not necessarily who political advertisers are hoping to reach. Facebook has both a sophisticated tool set for campaigns and an older audience, for example, both of which make it more attractive to advertisers. Google, meanwhile, has a sophisticated advertising network that is pervasive on the Web, offering its own advantages.
This isn’t theoretical. Data on campaign spending from the Federal Election Commission shows how much money is spent on each of the platforms. Google and Facebook easily outpace Twitter. In recent cycles, Facebook has surpassed Google, in part on the strength of its campaign-focused tools. (We included Snapchat out of curiosity; it’s a distant fourth.)
(Those numbers exclude advertising that might have been purchased through contractors, such as political consulting firms.)
The difference is even more dramatic if you look at cumulative spending since the dawn of the social media era, the 2008 election. Campaigns have spent $46 million on Facebook (and Instagram) and $30 million on Google (and AdSense). They’ve spent less than $2 million on Twitter.
There have been about 64,000 Facebook transactions by campaigns and 34,000 Google ones. Twitter comes in at 2,600.
The point of citing these numbers, of course, is to point out that Twitter is a smaller platform than either Facebook or Google, that it has consistently been a smaller platform for advertisement in general than either of those platforms, and that it has seen but a fraction of the political advertising that either Facebook or Google have. (Indeed, in all my years on Twitter I can honestly say I have no memory of ever seeing a political ad of any kind on the site.) This means first of all that Twitter has less to lose out of taking what is essentially a moralistic response, and second that it is has going to have very little impact on online political advertising in general.
Bump also goes on to note that Dorsey is stating that the company’s policy will ban not just ads for or against candidates, but also issue-based advertising that doesn’t specifically refer to a candidate, which could be problematic:
What will be more interesting to watch once that policy is released is how Twitter will handle issue advertising. Issue ads have been a loophole in political spending for years, with political groups often forming tax-exempt 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups to avoid campaign contribution and spending limits. There are rules guiding that spending, but they are lax enough to make issues advertising both common and contentious.
Dorsey addressed those ads, too.
“We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent,” he wrote. “Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we’re stopping these too.”
This is a tricky position to take. Figuring out when a campaign is spending money is relatively straightforward (though not always trivial). Figuring out what constitutes an inappropriate political issue campaign is much trickier.
An ad from House candidate Joe Smith would be banned. An ad from Citizens for Green Space that touts Smith’s record on creating Municipal Park is a bit murkier but still pretty clear. But what about an ad from the Westside Neighborhood Association inviting people to come out to an event at beautiful Municipal Park, which is a central part of Smith’s campaign pitch? The line gets quite blurry, quite fast.
It’s the sort of can of worms that makes social media platforms wary of new efforts to police content. Now Twitter and Dorsey have cracked the can’s lid — and we’ll have to see how far back they’ll peel it, if you’ll forgive the extended metaphor.
As a general rule, of course, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies are free to accept or deny political ads as they wish. The only legal restriction they could potentially face is if they set a policy that meant, explicitly or implicitly, that they would only accept ads from candidates of a specific party, but even then the rules governing social media companies, which are far less stringent than those that apply to other media companies, permit them to set whatever policy they wish. Additionally, this is obviously not a First Amendment issue since these are private companies that are free to censor both ad content and the content of posts as they see fit. I don’t believe this should be changed, nor do I believe that these social media companies should be scrutinized regarding the decisions they make in this regard.
That being said, my preference for the private sector is generally the same as my preference regarding the First Amendment, namely that censorship should be as limited as possible and that the public square of social media should be one where a wide variety of opinions are allowed to flourish. This is why I find the current talk in Congress regarding efforts to somehow police the content on social media sites for so-called “fake news” so problematic. More often than not what one considers to be “fake news” depends on one’s point of view, so it seems inevitable that any effort to regulate it is going to either be over overly restrictive or entirely meaningless.
The other problem with this policy, of course, is that it opens the door to regulation that could lead to governments forcing social media companies to censor content rather than closing it. Once a company like Twitter or Facebook concedes that there are some things it will not accept on its site, the harder it becomes to resist demands from politicians and interest groups that it censor content based on their preferences. Already, for example, Twitter has faced complaints from the left and the right that it is either overly open about what it allows to be posted on the site or that it is engaging in content-based censorship of user posts. Conservatives, in particular, have been complaining for years that their posts on the site are being hidden, a practice that was given the name “shadow banning,” or that they have been banned from the site entirely based on arbitrary rules used against them because of their point of view. Engaging in more content-based censorship, however well-meaning, is only going to make those complaints more prevalent and make future content-based regulation more likely.
Twitter’s policy, of course, is unlikely to have much of an impact on online political advertising. As Bump notes, the company accounts for a tiny fraction of all the social media spending by political candidates and interest groups in no small part because it is not a medium that is well-suited to advertising to begin with. The far bigger fish is Facebook, which dominates the world of social media advertising in general and political advertising in particular. For example, spending on Facebook ads mostly targeted at supporters and likely supporters is a significant part of the Trump 2020 campaign’s online media campaign. As early as May of this year, for example, Trump was outspending all of his potential 2020 Democratic opponents by a huge margin, and that is only likely to increase. More recently, it was reported that the campaign was dropping more than a million dollars on anti-impeachment advertising and Facebook. No doubt, Democrats will be engaging in similar amounts of digital advertising assuming they can afford to do so.
This means that Twitter’s decision to ban political ads is basically a symbolic move that seems more geared toward gaining sympathy from the growing chorus of support in Congress for regulating Facebook and Google, although none of the people making such calls seems to have a workable plan. Symbolic or not though, it is precisely the wrong approach to take for a company that is supposed to be devoted to the free exchange of ideas.
THIS – but for a reason you seem to completely miss and which makes your First Amendment-related concerns wholly misplaced.
Twitter isn’t prohibiting the *posting* of ads. The candidates, campaigns or advocacy groups can simply tweet out their messages, videos, etc. . What Twitter is banning is paid promotions of those tweets. That is all.
Twitter did this just to Fuq with Facebook.
If Facebook did it…that would be a good day for Democracy.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
I completely disagree, for the reasons stated in the post.
Restricting speech, especially political speech, is never a good thing.
@Doug Mataconis:
How is Twitter restricting speech? They aren’t preventing anyone from having an account or tweeting. The “Carotene Caligula”, as you have dubbed him, is still going to tweet and get his message out. Same with any other candidate or group. So why do you think this is problematic?
Doug–I remind you of how the Tutsi-Hutu genocide got started. Is there any point before the axes were raised that you would have clamped down on the radio broadcasts?
And if not, how would you have kept the Tutsis from being massacred?
At what point can speech be considered “hate speech” and something to be dealt with? If it’s only ten seconds before being targeted as the focal point of a lynching mob that’s not very useful.
(I suspect that if you belonged to a group that historically had ended up as the business end of similar massacres you’d have a much different opinion. Very easy to be righteous and idealistic about “free speech” if you never have to experience the downside of such “freedom”)
Despite terrible Supreme Court decisions to the contrary, money isn’t speech.
Twitter isn’t censoring speech here, they are making it harder to force people to listen. And they are making it harder for someone with money to crowd out other speech.
Ultimately, this should make it easier for a wide variety of opinions to be allowed to flourish.
@grumpy realist:
QFT
@Gustopher:
Nothing prevents politicians and/or their wealthy donors from setting up their own rival social network, where they can allow political ads if they want.
I weep for our democracy if the average citizen will only hear lying GOP ads 257,893 times over the next 367 days, instead of 291,312 times.
All (single tear)…is lost
(Crying Indian seeing litter emoji)
@Doug Mataconis:
Something has to be done. If Facebook refuses to police it’s content, then stopping it all together may be the only answer.
Social Media is THE way Russia attacked our Democracy. Having technology used inappropriately is not new, but never have the stakes been this high. Certainly there are lo-impact ways to prevent these attacks from happening again…but in the absence of any effort at all to prevent this exploitation by bad actors, then blanket moves like this are probably best.
Intentionally false content racked up 38 million shares leading up to the 2016 election. False content is 70% more likely to be shared or re-tweeted than factual.
This is a major fuqing problem for our Republic.
Going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ does nothing to help solve it.
@Jon: This is why I don’t agree with SCOTUS’s decisions about begging being free speech. I suspect that if each Justice had to run a gamut of beggars each day to and from a subway station 1/2 mile away, then the beggars ON the train as well, then they’d have a totally different opinion about it.
It’s always easy to be moral about a situation you know you’ll never have to deal with.
If more speech is always better, then anyone who ever banned a commenter from a website was wrong.
@grumpy realist:
I … did not see that coming. I think my reaction to begging being considered protected speech would be more along the lines of “yes, and let’s figure out why people have to resort to begging in the first place and fix that.”
I am concerned about You Tube and some their slanted actions of removing videos and channels. Some of those are of people and subjects that I have watched and followed for some time. I don’t know what their criteria is and just how they are making these judgements.
This is not good in my opinion. They are removing information, ideas, opinions, and theories that I am interested in.
It is like they don’t want certain things to get out to the
public out here.
@Jon: We’ve got here in Chicago a bunch of people with mental issues, drug issues, homelessness, health issues….especially in the summer, we seem to be a magnet because so many train lines and bus lines have Chicago as the terminus.
One can feel sorry for said individuals and still not want to be the meat-on-the-hoof when it comes to being pestered for cash.
My own opinion is that until we start a multi-prong attack on the problem we’re never going to get anywhere. I also think that if you aren’t able to take care of yourself and you’re unwilling to carry out the actions necessary to fix your situation (with state support) then the state might as well institutionalise you until you are willing to take responsibility for your life. But then I worry about the ethics necessary to live in an enclosed environment.
@Teve: But “more speech is better” isn’t always true, of course. More speech being better depends on a concerned, intelligent, and discerning audience. But it does make a good platitude to vocalize when one wants to pontificate.
@grumpy realist:
As a New Orleanian I wonder, what is this “state support” of which you speak?
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
This is how bad ideas start. We must do something. This is something. Let’s do it.
@Hal_10000:
This is also how good ideas start.. Something has to be done about this slavery. Something has to be done about this genocide…..
It’s interesting how you missed that obvious point.
@Hal_10000: That certainly applies to some people carrying on about “gun control – do something now”. Well, some of them found out to their amazement that some of their proposals were already laws!
This rushing to do something usually winds up with half baked, contradictory, overlapping regulations.
“It’s all for nothing. All for nothing”
Doug: a libertarian bumps up against reality.
@Jon: That’s why I’m for high (and progressive) state and income tax rates to cover services that everyone needs. But I live in Illinois, with a lot of people who think like me. If you’re in Louisiana and most other Southern states, the bulk of the (rich) inhabitants want no taxes and crappy services, which unfortunately leaves the poor to fend for themselves. The rich, who can pay for private services, don’t seem to care.
Another problem is that we’re not a pure laboratory where “50 states bloom” with different levels of taxation because we also have a lot of movement of individuals from state to state. It would be interesting to see what sort of splits between gov’t/private providers of services, tax levels, and state services we would get if each state did in fact develop in isolation. Then of course there’s the level of non-contributory population that each state’s economy can in fact support, as well as the level of public sector employees it can afford. Like most states, Illinois has some stuff in its Constitution which must have sounded good when trying to protect public sector employees from political financial shenanigans, but is now absolutely ridiculous in light of our overall state economy and the amount of debt the State of Illinois is burdened with.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
Keep in mind that Doug believes that sober individuals posting truth can be an effective counter to massively funded organizations mounting disinformation campaigns.
I’ll let that sink in.
I don’t think you have much chance of convincing Doug that the utility of his core values has been empirically falsified, and thus some other set of values is required.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
There was one person who actually figured out how to type out the text shrug emoji.
Everyone since just Googles it and copy-pastes it. I would love it if someone back-tracked it and figured out who created it. They are owed retroactive residuals.
@Matt: Leans conservative. Missing the point is fundamental to the conservative axiom that when the outcome cannot be guaranteed, the best action is inaction (unless there’s money to be made, of course).
@de stijl: What I’m scratching my head about is the Japanese character in the middle. The katakana “tsu” isn’t a standard character in any font pack I know of (unless you’re writing Japanese.)
Speaking of Twitter: Man Sues Twitter For $1 Billion Claiming His Account’s Suspension Violated His Right To Worship President Trump As A Demigod.
Plaintiff is self-avowed “constitutionalist” who was probably surprised to find, in losing the suit, that Twitter isn’t bound by the First Amendment.
@sam: I suspect the legal departments of Twitter and Facebook have a template legal document for filing a response explaining how the First Amendment works that they submit whenever they get one of these accusations. They can probably bang one out in five minutes.
I don’t know whether I should feel sorry for the idiot who filed the original case or satisfaction that he’s probably been charged an arm-and-a-leg for a stupid lawsuit that his lawyer knew had a very bad chance of success. Probably the original doofus refused to accept “you’re not going to win” and went from lawyer to lawyer until he found one willing to indulge his fancies.
(I wouldn’t have indulged him because clients with legal bees-in-their-bonnet also are typically very bad at paying their legal bills when the expected happens and their legal suit gets chucked out of court. But maybe other legal practitioners have experienced better payment records.)