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Twitter to ban political advertising

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Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#61
post #37
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?

Major League Soccer is going through this problem now. They prohibit political displays in stadium but are now in the business of deciding whether signs that say things like "anti-racist" or "anti-fascist" or "end gun violence" are political or not, and all of the worms that come out of that can. https://deadspin.com/by-banning-protest-signs-mls-is-trying-...

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Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought would be that any ad that isn't advertising a product or service for sale should be classed as a political ad.

What about my side project Read Across The Aisle? We make a free news reader app that helps people keep track of their media bias. That is inherently political (the whole point is to help people become more well-rounded), but running an ad for my free app shouldn't be seen as a political ad since we are devoutly non-partisan.

they aren't saying they're banning partisan advertising, they're banning political advertising. a non-partisan political ad is still a political ad.

that said, just because a product is free doesn't mean ads aren't "selling" it, which exposes the flaw in my criteria: if you're selling a political product, an ad can both be trying to sell a product and be a political ad at the same time.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#63
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?

My first thought would be that any ad that isn't advertising a product or service for sale should be classed as a political ad.

So- can people sell political bumper stickers or no?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there was a way to communicate more than a couple sentences at the time over the internet. Someone should make that!

You can't really criticise twitter for this - last year they were all ready to launch a way to embed text posts in a tweet like images can currently be embedded in a tweet, until the userbase revolted and they had to cancel the plan.

Really? The twitter userbase actually prefers it this way? That's baffling to me. Did the revolting userbase provide any reasons or explanations for this preference?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#67
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

So does that mean some group like the American Cancer Society can't advertise?

Sounds like the American Cancer Society can advocate for itself but not for candidates or policies.

Fine:

Donate to fight cancer

Not fine:

Donate to Candidate X to support cancer research

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#69

Campaign finance is illegal in most of the first world. If political ads were banned in the US, politicians wouldn't need money to get reelected (Ads get the majority of votes.). When a politician needs money to get reelected they have to take money from lobbyists. Banning political ads is crucial linchpin to getting money out of politics.

Political ads are free speech.
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