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Twitter to ban political advertising

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Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#21
post #7

Is this when we now start to wonder what will count as a political ad? Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?

I mean social movements are all political. So I guess grass roots will be okay, just not paid or paid endorsements. So no promoting of the Sierra Club by commercial entities... for example.

This is going to be s can of worms.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#23
post #7

Is this when we now start to wonder what will count as a political ad? Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?

The FEC has pretty clear rules about what constitutes a political ad, and presumably Twitter will be using those. But whether that satisfies the (both literal and metaphorical) parties who've been grousing about political ads on Twitter/FB is a different story. Twitter might correctly point out that a given contentious ad doesn't satisfy the FEC's definition and that still won't stop the complaints.

Still, I think they're now in a better spot than Facebook.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#25
post #7

Is this when we now start to wonder what will count as a political ad? Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?

I suppose we'll find out on 11/15. Could use elections/votes as a proxy for what constitutes a political ad.

If the thing/person being promoted can be voted on/in, it's a political ad.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#26
post #7

Is this when we now start to wonder what will count as a political ad? Social movements that have a political connection / associated with a particular party or candidate?

A post from the other day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380985

A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following:

> You don't take money from clients who are representing/selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative & landing pages for each and every campaign. It's extremely simple.

Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#27

We don't let blatantly false ads run on TV. Why is it so hard for Facebook or Twitter to do the same thing?

> We don't let blatantly false ads run on TV.

Did you cut the cable years ago? I think perhaps you've forgotten how bad some political ads on TV are.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#29

This makes sense.. though I'm not sure it will do much in practice to improve political discourse. The combination of politicians having twitter accounts and twitter's content recommendation engine promoting politician's tweets make me think the perceived effect to the end user (twitter showing people messages from politicians or their supporters) will remain more or less the same. But because twitter isn't taking mo…

Not to mention, traditional journalists (who still have enormous reach) relying almost entirely on Twitter as their source.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#30
One of the key aspects of political content on social media is that you don't necessarily need to buy ads to get your message in front of people. You can instead pay for an army of bots to spread your message and make it appear as genuine user generated content rather than a prepackaged advertisement. So while this decision by Twitter is in my opinion good, what are they doing to cut down on inauthentic political engagement that has become a hallmark of the platform?
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