Message from Twitter
Last week, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, he stated that Facebook would not review political ads for truthfulness, even though it reviews non-political ads. This cynical and inconsistent position has drawn a lot of criticism. Yesterday, seemingly in response, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced (via a series of tweets, of course) that Twitter will no longer carry political ads at all. Twitter’s announcement garnered some praise, especially in comparison to Facebook’s indefensible position. However, in truth, the Twitter position is lazy and even cowardly. Twitter, and Facebook, should instead adopt standards and do the work of vetting political ads.
To be fair, at least Twitter’s new policy has some consistency, treating every would-be political advertiser the same, compared to Facebook. However, we know that it is certainly possible to vet these political ads, because Facebook says that it does vet non-political ads. Unlike posts to the platform, which can come in on millions of “pages” at once, ads presumably come through some central funnel, where they are processed for payment, are reviewed (such as in the case of Facebook’s non-political ads), etc.
Second, virtually all reputable media outlets have standards and a process for vetting ads. For example, the New York Times has an “Advertising Acceptability Manual” containing numerous standards for ads. According to these standards:
In general, advertisements in the following categories are unacceptable:
* Ads that are misleading inaccurate or fraudulent.
* Illegal materials or content.
* Inappropriate content, language, violence, sexual
* Ads that may be gratuitously offensive on religious, racial or ethnic grounds
* Advertisement that mimic New York Times style or content.
* Gambling advertisements (except where not specifically legal)
* Advertisements without sponsors name (blind ads)
* Advertisements leading to faux blog sites
* Non-user initiated audio and continuous movement ads.
* Tobacco ads
* Ads for firearms (except hunting rifles at retail) See “firearms”
* Diet pills
* Advertisements that discriminate on the grounds of race, religion, sex, age, etc.
Twitter and Facebook could decide to develop standards like these. Admittedly, this takes work, and the results are not always perfect, but such work gets compensated with potentially huge advertising revenues. The opposite of that is, in Facebook’s case, losing massive credibility (and subscribers, such as Messaging Matters), and in Twitter’s case, losing political ad revenues altogether. Twitter is a public company, and we’ll see how its shareholders feel about this decision to cut off an entire revenue stream.
A further problem with Twitter’s new policy lies in the question, “What is a political ad?” While Twitter will prohibit paid advertising that could show up on anyone’s feed, it won’t ban the free tweets sent by Donald Trump, his family members and many others, sometimes dozens of times per day, that are clearly ads for themselves, their party or their agenda. So the effect of Twitter’s decision may be that the problem of false political statements that started this whole issue may even become magnified as the 2020 elections approach.
Finally, Twitter’s decision is essentially an argument for having no political ads in any mass media. That would avoid the problem of false and misleading ads, of course, but it would also mean that we would get no truthful, substantive political advertising over such media. While some folks might be happy about that, others might miss the opportunity to be informed about our political process. Denying such information altogether, as Twitter has done, sounds like the coward’s way out.
Photo by Cambodia4kids.org Beth Kanter, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/VljAjg
