I help run a digital political agency (with partner(s)). Still thinking through this but a few initial reactions that might provide a different perspective:
- I haven't found a lot of utility in Twitter outside of reaching really specific insiders/decision makers. In terms of direct response FB is far superior and FB also wins with targeting, reach, and the persuasion/recall studies we've done as well. That is to say TW doesn't get much if any of our client's budget. Seems some larger 'brand name' candidates get better direct response. Point is it's a small fraction of our digital spend, and I would guess far less than .5% of twitter's ad revenue.
- what about paid 'influencer' or social marketing ads? e.g. I pay person XX to post organically. Or the much larger problem of bots/fake/gamed content.
- TW seems to be (I can't quantify though maybe others can) to be either totally inept at reducing fake/gamed content at worst complicit because they need the growth from fake numbers. This seems like it has much larger impact than paid political advertising and should be the first thing to get serious about. This seems like if the goal is to lose weight cutting your nails probably isn't the first thing to do.
- I had a strong reaction reading Dorsey's tech points saying ML, micro-targeting are 'powerful and very effective for __ advertisers.' But to me it seems odd to make a differentiation that it's ok to use these 'extremely effective' tools to profitably 'target and force people to see their __ ad' while blocking political speech (to help this point I left political/commercial blank, try flipping them). TW will happily 'force people to see' ads for alcohol, sugar companies, etc and the point is it works, whether selling a politician or product or Disney if the tech is dangerous for politics why isn't dangerous for commerce (or where is the line in dangerous commerce)? IDK I think I have a different perspective on the fundamental importance of political speech than this group. But this seems like an odd argument to me. To that point of drawing political lines, what about a company advertising to sell copies of a racist book on replacement theory, which has been shown to correlate with recent rise of dangerous white nationalism (mass shooters buy the book) and externalities like electing Trump?