Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a full ban on political ads Wednesday amid backlash over Facebook’s refusal to take down political ads containing false information.
This is a good step…now if they can just manage to shut down posting from people who violate their standards, no matter who they are, it would be even better.
“This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach,” he wrote. “And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.”
It’s a good thing to prevent false political ads, and if you can’t do that without banning all of them, that’s fine with me. Good start.
But (a) paying for political reach is kind of fundamental to all campaigns and (b) you also need to control the bots and fake accounts.
Well, a certain orange someone drives a lot of Twitter clicks, so that will never happen.
I had always assumed that Jack Dorsey was the “republican” of the Twitter-Facebook axis. As such this is a surprise to me. And it really puts the pressure of Zuckerberg, who of course is just wallowing in Trump advert money as Trump wants to reach the 70+ year old and rightwing set, and they all are on Facebook. Unless Zuckerberg really wants to be the Reich Minister of †Я☭mp -iganta, he really needs to reconsider his current course.
For once in his life Zuckerberg needs to do the right thing, not what he thinks will protect his business empire from being attacked from the right.
“Well, congresswoman, I think lying is bad, and I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie in it, that would be bad,”
I hope AOC followed up with “What if I lied my ass off but did it under my own congressional twitter handle? Still bad? What if I were the president telling lies? Is that political?”
Zuckerberg continued, “But don’t get me wrong – I’d still take your money.”
Before catching a fly and eating it.
Then his pupils expanded to cover the entire surface area of his eyeballs with impenetrable jet black.
While panicked onlookers scrambled from the hearing room.
So no political ads but no fact checking on tweets from office holders and candidates? It feels a lot like campaign finance rules that don’t regulate dark money from PACs. The lies will find another way into the medium.
When the framers of the constitution referred to “FREE SPEACH” they were referencing what comes out of your lungs not your wallet.
That said, in my view all media should stop selling political advertisements especially television. Rather, as a price for using the public airwaves stations should be required to provide all candidates a reasonable amount of time to get their messages. Furthermore, candidates on TV should only be allowed to speak into the camera and not use commercials. Actually, this view is not original to me but to Walter Cronkite.
Just in time to qualify as way too late.
“Well, lying is bad, m’kay?”
Politico’s headline on this calls it a “shot at Zuckerberg”. Like shooting fish in a barrel, really. A really big, arrogant fish.
I’ll take the other side of that bet any day.
I don’t love Dorsey, and I don’t use either FB or Twit myself, but Mark Zuck and his company have consistently and repeatedly shown themselves to be undeserving of the slightest morsel of trust.
Now if they would just ban mental health ads, then it would be “bye bye, Donald”.
Zuckerberg can go fuck himself as far as I am concerned. I hope they go down the tubes.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a full ban on political ads…
Well, how, exactly, does he define “political ad?” Does it include any political statement? Will Chiselin’ Trump be able to continue spewing lies about political and policy matters via Twitter?
Thank you, Twitter, for helping make other social networks (—> Facebook <—) look like fascist-loving pariahs.
Ever notice that Zuckerberg and Greedyfuck is a near-anagram?
Yes, he just can’t pay to tweet. But twatter can most certainly runs ads against his twardlery.