I'm still not sure what I think about the ban, but one potential downside is it will give people with lots of organic reach, like celebrities and incumbents, a big advantage. Before you could use organic reach to combat paid reach and vice versa, but now organic reach is the only thing that counts. For example, if The Rock runs for governor of California next year, it will be very hard for his opponents to compete (at least on Twitter, and on any other platforms that follow this policy).
Twitter to ban political advertising
471–480 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility. Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost, and then they would still have fully responsibility over it. If they just want to decentralize & use peer-to-peer instead they could also do that, and a blockchain still wouldn't be a useful aspect there. That's just a mailing list.
> Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost Why do you assume that? Modern blockchains are not proof-of-work, and the only info you need on a blockchain are permissions and encryption keys to data on other distributed storage networks (e.g, IPFS.) So the cost isn't really very high, and probably worth the tradeoff for groups that feel alienated or disenfra…
Modern blockchains don't host images and face twitter's level of traffic, either.
Bandwidth & storage isn't free. Why would anyone voluntarily just do that for Twitter? Even if it's literally entirely free to setup & host, that's still someone's time & motivation to do so. People do this for blockchain because they're trying to get rich off of it. There's no money in hosting tweets.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#473Twitter makes more from "free ads" than paid ads, and they just want an out. The out is "we aren't making money from political ads!". When you go check Trump's latest tweet (which can be full of lies) or Uncle Buck's retweet (which can be full of lies) you are also viewing ads.
Twitter stand is simply: we won't make money directly from political ads because 1 - we don't make money there anyway, and 2 - this is good PR. However we will make all the money we can off ads tied to the free for all of russian bot posts, AOC posts, Trump posts, and Uncle Buck retweets.
Anyone who thinks Jack Dorsey cares at all about democracy vs profits has blinders on.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility. Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost, and then they would still have fully responsibility over it. If they just want to decentralize & use peer-to-peer instead they could also do that, and a blockchain still wouldn't be a useful aspect there. That's just a mailing list.
> Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility. I'm still kind of amazed that the government hasn't cracked down on bitcoin miners for hosting child pornography yet; every full node is hosting it. If the government ever wants to crack down on blockchains they have a valid legal excuse. The longer they go without cracking down, the more it seems like we as a society are accepting the existence of…
> I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.
How are those companies going to make money from hosting tweets? Are you letting blockchain hosts inject things? If so that's a security & privacy nightmare just waiting to happen. If not, it's financially insane to host it unless twitter pays people to do so. And if they do that then hey they're simply contractors for twitter, and twitter is again bearing the full burden of responsibility.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#475I'm still not sure what I think about the ban, but one potential downside is it will give people with lots of organic reach, like celebrities and incumbents, a big advantage. Before you could use organic reach to combat paid reach and vice versa, but now organic reach is the only thing that counts. For example, if The Rock runs for governor of California next year, it will be very hard for his opponents to compete (a…
Even further, it is well known that Twitter throttles follow counts and shadow bans people They Don't Like™, so Twitter is already artificially promoting some people, and demoting others. And that's before we get into the outright suspensions.
Twitter doesn't have organic speech, period. And now they're justifying why they allow some political ads, but not others.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#476Twitter makes more from "free ads" than paid ads, and they just want an out. The out is "we aren't making money from political ads!". When you go check Trump's latest tweet (which can be full of lies) or Uncle Buck's retweet (which can be full of lies) you are also viewing ads. Twitter stand is simply: we won't make money directly from political ads because 1 - we don't make money there anyway, and 2 - this is good P…
Totally agree with this. I find it odd that Twitter doesn’t view organic reach as actually black market paid reach, or at least some component.
Part of the value of running a legit ads campaign is the finances and incentive to beat away fraud and black market/black hat techniques.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#477I see a lot of calls here for facebook to follow suit. I run a facebook advertising agency and use their tools every day (including the political advertising tools) and would like to offer some perspective on the potential nuances here. When I run an ad on facebook, if the ad contains "issues of national importance" that ad is subject to the same rules as political advertising. From facebook, this includes any ads on…
Not necessarily, because it depends where Facebook would draw that line.
We don't even know where Twitter will draw that line, making it a difficult problem for them.
They could, for example, allow charity ads, while banning "Vote for X ads."
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
So is it not better to take the twitter approach here and just say - political advertising = banned? Take the decision out of what is true / not true out of it and just remove the political advertisements all together.
It's still not easy. Suppose I write a bot that flags all of my competitors ads a political?
At least then Twitter would have a pretty clear incentive to combat your bot as it and its ilk could have a substantial effect on their revenue. No doubt this will happen. You could already be doing this on youtube to flag a competitor's content as copyright infringement.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#479counter argument: having something explicitly labeled as "advertisement" allows for people to take it into context. now that that route has been taken away, advertisers would pursuit native marketing, even more subversive.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#480"Bots" are such a boogeyman on Twitter, usually from older folks that just don't understand the nature of the internet. I've seen threads where completely legitimate people are accused of being "bots." If the problem were so extreme, it would be much more pronounced. It's incredibly hard to police, and it happens on every single platform.
Bots on Twitter thankfully are rare, but on Youtube, for example, there is quite a bit of bot activity.