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Twitter to ban political advertising

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Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#91
post #5

Here is Jack Dorsey's commentary thread: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952

> For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ;)”

savage

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#93

I don't agree with every call Twitter makes, but I find Dorsey to be by far the most interesting public figure in the social media game. His two JRE interviews[0][1] and his Tales from the Crypto interview[2] are all worth checking out, IMO. He seems to think Twitter should use a blockchain in the future, and that small social circles should have a system for internally moderating content without needing it to be oka…

I'm not sure why a blockchain is needed for this. Can't they just have an API where certain posts are "flagged" and hidden in the official UI? If you want to opt-out, you simply use a UI that doesn't hide flagged.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#94
For this to work, they need to start immediately with an incredibly conservative policy, akin to the presumption of innocence in the justice system. An ad should be presumed political unless it can be shown, through a series of positive affirmations with the burden of proof on the ad-maker, that it isn’t. Avoid the slippery slope by saying that some non-political ads will be banned to ensure all political ads are. For unpaid speech regulation this would be an insane standard, but for paid speech it’s a just one.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#96
So only pro-consumerism political ads are allowed now.

So Toyota can buy ads to promote their gas burning cars, but I can't buy ads to encourage people to stop burning up the environment.

Only profit-seekers can buy mindshare.

This whole debate is absurd. Trump rose to the White House on $1B worth of unpaid media exposure by being an outrageous personality. How is that better for democracy than paid ads?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#97
post #22

So given that there are bots they can't detect, should they just ban all political speech to prevent any bots from abusing their platform?

I think the majority of people on Twitter would be happy if any political conversation simply disappeared.

The vocal minority would never let this happen as they would take it as being silenced for their views.

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#98
post #48

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…

It will remove the direct influence on who the ad gets sent to at least, a tweet will spread organically to a much wider audience than a targeted ad so messages cannot be as micro-targeted.

Good point. Now if only we could ban micro-targetting in general. It's a corrosive force to society in a wide array of scenarios, not just political advertising. (For instance, it's been known to facilitate discrimination in real estate and the job market.)

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#99
post #67
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How about ACLU or Planned Parenthood?

Re: Twitter to ban political advertising

#100
post #5

Here is Jack Dorsey's commentary thread: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952

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

For sure, https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1189634360472829952.html !
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