I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s it. Twitter was going to be sued if they allowed one party to advertise but not the other. This decision allows them to still behave with some partisanship via their moderation policy.Facebook is taking the safer position in this case, IMO, from a legal&#x2F;regulatory perspective. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see what shakes out.

Because Facebook wants those ads. They productize the ability to run them, and it&#x27;s revenue they want. They lie about or disguise their participation in the market and their policies policing that content. Facebook continues to take steps to get more of that revenue. It&#x27;s not &quot;hard&quot;, it&#x27;s just just they don&#x27;t want to do it.

False premise: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politifact.com&#x2F;truth-o-meter&#x2F;statements&#x2F;2019&#x2F;oct&#x2F;15&#x2F;elizabeth-warren&#x2F;phony-facebook-ad-warren-said-most-tv-networks-wil&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politifact.com&#x2F;truth-o-meter&#x2F;statements&#x2F;2019&#x2F;oct...</a>

&gt; We don&#x27;t let blatantly false ads run on TV.Did you cut the cable years ago? I think perhaps you&#x27;ve forgotten how bad some political ads on TV are.

One word: scaleA tv channel has like 6 to 9 slots per 30 minutes of content and most of those slots have the same ads playing multiple times in a day. I would guess that there’s at most 1-2 hours of unique ad content for one channel per week to review.With user generated content and thousands of unique ad slots, using humans to verify is prohibitive.

&gt; We don&#x27;t let blatantly false ads run on TV.Since when?

There&#x27;s some pretty misleading TV ads out there, especially in more purple (contentious) districts.  Senate race in Arizona, for example have been brutal, and abstracted by PACs.

Cause money makes the world go &#x27;round?

There are a lot of baltantly false ads on TV, and have been for decades.Remember &quot;this is your brain on drugs&quot;? Or how about the &quot;drugs fund terrorism&quot; super bowl ads? That was a blatantly false campaign designed primarily not to discourage drug use, but to make it difficult for mainstream organizations and their people from supporting drug policy reform.Isn&#x27;t every Volkswagen ad which touted fuel economy in their diesel vehicles essentially a blatantly false ad on the issue of climate change and carbon use?Many pharmaceutical ads have some blatantly false messaging, whether overt or not, and all of them carry the same political message: that the current system of regulation and intellectual property around drugs is healthy for people.TV is overrun by blatantly false ads that, once you think about it, have an unambiguously political component.

We actually do... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thebalancecareers.com&#x2F;should-tv-stations-ban-false-political-ads-3956480" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thebalancecareers.com&#x2F;should-tv-stations-ban-fal...</a>For social media to start fact checking ads is actually a big change, but maybe the right thing to do, even if it&#x27;s hard.

We don&#x27;t let blatantly false ads run on TV. Why is it so hard for Facebook or Twitter to do the same thing?

Very. How do you enforce it and what defines a political ad? Who gets to be the judge, jury and enforcer? A contract Twitter employee making less than $20&#x2F;hour in a low-tax country like Ireland?

I find &quot;tweet storms&quot; insufferable

You can&#x27;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.

Are you crazy. I&#x27;m surprised this app hasn&#x27;t taken the internet by storm.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=morse.vedppa.android.com.morseapp_as&amp;hl=en_US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=morse.vedppa.a...</a>

Realistically, people don&#x27;t read longer-than-tweet-sized things. Best of both worlds is probably to tweet the gist then link to a longer explanation.

For sure, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1189634360472829952.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1189634360472829952.html</a> !

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

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1189634360472829952.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1189634360472829952.html</a>

This is a great decision, and that&#x27;s a well reasoned thread. Hopefully this puts pressure on other big players like Facebook.

It&#x27;s a gamification choice.  Watching those numbers tick up is proven to be addictive and keep people on the site.

Off topic, but who the hell decided we need live updates of retweet and like counts on the page? That is distracting af.

&gt;While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics,It&#x27;s kind of horrifying that one can make such a statement, acknowledging the dangers of advertising, but still insinuating that commercial advertising somehow isn&#x27;t dangerous and harmful, just the political ads...

Thanks! Just gonna put it all inline here:Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO1:05 PM · Oct 30, 2019<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1189634360472829952" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1189634360472829952</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1189634360472829952.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1189634360472829952.html</a>--------------------------------------------------------We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.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! ”We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we&#x27;re stopping these too.We’re well aware we‘re a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.We’ll share the final policy by 11&#x2F;15, including a few exceptions (ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed, for instance). We’ll start enforcing our new policy on 11&#x2F;22 to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change goes into effect.A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.

&gt; 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

Here is Jack Dorsey&#x27;s commentary thread:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1189634360472829952" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1189634360472829952</a>

in 95% of cases it&#x27;s a trivial decision, in particular if you want to stop the most egregious offenders. It&#x27;s like the infamous line about porn, you know it when you see it.On edge cases time will work out standards, that&#x27;s what these companies ought to employ humans for.

I would say start here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eight_Magic_Words" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eight_Magic_Words</a> and amend as necessary.

Now the fun part -- defining political ads.

Probably. But likely a smaller can of worms than allowing political ads.

Grassroots movements don&#x27;t spend money on ads. They are the viral.. spread naturally and don&#x27;t have an ad manager or staff.Once you start paying for ads you are an organization.

I mean social movements are all political. So I guess grass roots will be okay, just not paid or paid endorsements. So no promoting of the Sierra Club by commercial entities... for example.This is going to be s can of worms.

&gt; The FEC has pretty clear rules about what constitutes a political ad, and presumably Twitter will be using those.I know that the FEC maintains guidelines for what Coordinated Communications, but I&#x27;ve never heard of this definition of &quot;political ad&quot; - can you provide a link?

The FEC has pretty clear rules about what constitutes a political ad, and presumably Twitter will be using those. But whether that satisfies the (both literal and metaphorical) parties who&#x27;ve been grousing about political ads on Twitter&#x2F;FB is a different story. Twitter might correctly point out that a given contentious ad doesn&#x27;t satisfy the FEC&#x27;s definition and that still won&#x27;t stop the complaints.Still, I think they&#x27;re now in a better spot than Facebook.

I suppose we&#x27;ll find out on 11&#x2F;15. Could use elections&#x2F;votes as a proxy for what constitutes a political ad.If the thing&#x2F;person being promoted can be voted on&#x2F;in, it&#x27;s a political ad.

That&#x27;s a good system, but I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s actually workable at the scale of Twitter or Facebook&#x27;s ad platforms. That&#x27;s a a lot of human review.

So does that mean some group like the American Cancer Society can&#x27;t advertise?

Not to mention explicitly political merchandise, #resistance shirts, Don&#x27;t Tread On Me flags, bumper stickers, QAnon coffee mugs...

The quote you posted just seems intentionally dismissive. The truth is that whether any content is political or not depends much more on the views of the audience than it does the content itself. Outside of ads that political campaigns would want to run directly, this means that twitter will be arbitrarily deciding what content is political (and therefor not allowed), and what content is non-political (and therefor allowed). The only possible outcome is that twitter moderates the content based upon whatever political perspective they choose to adopt for this.

A post from the other day:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21380985" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21380985</a>A user who works in digital advertising said they do the following:&gt; You don&#x27;t take money from clients who are representing&#x2F;selling anything other than goods or services. You evaluate creative &amp; landing pages for each and every campaign. It&#x27;s extremely simple.Seems like a mostly good solution. I guess you could still sell political services and goods though? Not sure how you would draw the line at that point, all goods and services can be argued to be political.

There&#x27;ll be a lot of feeling out that line because it&#x27;s impossible to draw a distinction that will work in every case. It&#x27;ll be especially hard in cases where particular issues become heavily associated with one party or another though I guess they could just say product ads only, that would probably be a little easier because the line between a political and non-political product is a bit easier to draw.

An option they have is to just filter it by to only allow companies that are trying to sell a product.

The Portland Timbers literally use the Cascadia Flag.  I mean, it&#x27;s a joke to imagine that political messages are banned.

The difference is that it&#x27;s easy to have &quot;a private org can set its own logically inconsistent policy&quot; (and every possible policy except &quot;everything is allowed&quot; is logically inconsistent) but impossible to have &quot;we will only allow universally agreed upon good things in this space&quot;.

I wouldn&#x27;t have a problem with expanding that to include social issues. You bought a ticket to see a game, not a billboard.This is a problem I have with modern social movements, when they fail to get audiences in public spaces they seek out captive audiences or to be disruptive as possible to completely unrelated places. Hold your rally in a park or march down main street or a pedestrian way or in front of some place you&#x27;re protesting. Stop walking down highways and forcing your messages in places which have nothing to do with your cause.

I think fascism is inherently political while racism is not necessarily.

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 &quot;anti-racist&quot; or &quot;anti-fascist&quot; or &quot;end gun violence&quot; are political or not, and all of the worms that come out of that can.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deadspin.com&#x2F;by-banning-protest-signs-mls-is-trying-to-lobotomize-t-1837410237" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deadspin.com&#x2F;by-banning-protest-signs-mls-is-trying-...</a>

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&#x27;t be seen as a political ad since we are devoutly non-partisan.

So- can people sell political bumper stickers or no?

My first thought would be that any ad that isn&#x27;t advertising a product or service for sale should be classed as a political ad.

The Sierra Club has a similar “dodge.” Most non-profits are tax exempt and many have separate PACs that aren’t tax exempt but are indirectly supported by their tax-exempt cohort if only by providing a mailing list from which to solicit donations.

I&#x27;m reminded of the dodge that religious institutions have achieved. In exchange for tax-exempt status, they are forbidden from explicit political stances and endorsements; yet in practice, many churches are highly influential in the political process, as they of course are allowed to take moral stances (abortion being the big one), and encouraging their congregations to &quot;vote their consciences&quot;, etc.Seems to me that Twitter advertisements would likely take the same path, where the bought political influence is instead abstracted away into generalized &quot;awareness campaigns&quot;, push-polls, etc.

Coca-Cola is political.
Microsoft is political.
All firms are political.Politics don&#x27;t go away just because you ontologize them as &quot;private sector&quot;.

Yes, but making a mistake on what is and isn&#x27;t adult content or people seeing it when they shouldn&#x27;t or vice versa doesn&#x27;t have much negative impact on society. A private company that lets political gray area ads slip through from one side, but not the other, will likely have an impact on society.

Most social networks already have to decide what counts as &quot;adult&quot; content, which has just as much gray area as what counts as &quot;political&quot;.

I believe the process to which you refer is called &quot;democracy&quot; ;)

That’s exactly how this is going to be gamed.

Is this when we now start to wonder what will count as a political ad?Social movements that have a political connection &#x2F; associated with a particular party or candidate?

Not to mention, traditional journalists (who still have enormous reach) relying almost entirely on Twitter as their source.

Good point.   Now if only we could ban micro-targetting in general.   It&#x27;s a corrosive force to society in a wide array of scenarios, not just political advertising.   (For instance, it&#x27;s been known to facilitate discrimination in real estate and the job market.)

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.

This makes sense.. though I&#x27;m not sure it will do much in practice to improve political discourse. The combination of politicians having twitter accounts and twitter&#x27;s content recommendation engine promoting politician&#x27;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&#x27;t taking money directly from those politicians, it perhaps reduces their perceived culpability. It seems like a good move for twitter.

Jack&#x27;s last tweet in this thread:&gt;paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handleIgnoring the technology aspects of this for a minute: he&#x27;s basically arguing directly against the Supreme Court&#x27;s Citizen&#x27;s United ruling, which I find interesting. If we&#x27;re going to argue that money is too corrupting in online political advertising then it really doesn&#x27;t have anything to do with being online.

clearly. But if that is the paid ad, is that a political ad?

Is #FreeHongKong considered a political ad?

Political ads are by rough estimation about 1.1% percent of all revenue(calculated from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;articles2.marketrealist.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;why-facebook-considered-ditching-political-advertising&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;articles2.marketrealist.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;why-facebook-con...</a>)So not a lot, but still it&#x27;s 1%

&quot;Gained market share&quot; is incidentally not what FB needs right now when they are already under heavy scrutiny for their political ad policies.

Who says they will? They just gained market share and more ad dollars.

The real question is how long it will take for Facebook to follow suit.

Some people may be conflating bots with paid trolls, which are a real and pervasive problem across many platforms.

Bots are also, generally, echo chambers that are easily detected.

Bots on Twitter thankfully are rare, but on Youtube, for example, there is quite a bit of bot activity.

&quot;Bots&quot; are such a boogeyman on Twitter, usually from older folks that just don&#x27;t understand the nature of the internet. I&#x27;ve seen threads where completely legitimate people are accused of being &quot;bots.&quot; If the problem were so extreme, it would be much more pronounced. It&#x27;s incredibly hard to police, and it happens on every single platform.

They’ve been working on this for years. It’s a hard problem. How would you solve it?

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.

So given that there are bots they can&#x27;t detect, should they just ban all political speech to prevent any bots from abusing their platform?

That&#x27;s not sufficient.Twitter surfaces tweets from people you&#x27;re not following in their UI. You may get notified, for example, if one of the people you follow interacts with the bot&#x27;s tweet.

Every time I see someone complaining about bots, its because there are a lot of likes for something they personally dislike. Not saying bots on the internet are not a problem, but I think lots of people are quick to blame bots instead of conceding that others may disagree with them. Its also virtually impossible to prove accounts as &quot;real&quot; or &quot;bots&quot; without some ID verification in place. People kinda do it via clustering&#x2F;graph analysis, but I think even those are iffy at best.

Will be interesting to see how Facebook plays this out now. Seems as if they are headed in the complete opposite direction.

I would hope not. They claim they&#x27;re also banning issue ads

Final policy 11&#x2F;15, enforcement starts 11&#x2F;22. This seems like a tricky line to walk. For example, could I promote a Tweet about the UBI without mentioning Andrew Yang?

Your comment is written in a way that implies that this happens. Do you have evidence to back that up? Not evidence that they take down suspected state-sponsored brigading, but that they were wrong?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;twitter-world-leaders-break-rules&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;twitter-world-leaders-brea...</a>He controls it all

You can also get an army of real actual people to spread your message and the company can just ban them and accuse them of being bots or having ties to some government without actual evidence.

Active user totals and engagement numbers are still a big driver in valuations so the incentives still align with not cracking down too hard (as long as legitimate users aren&#x27;t pushed away by the inauthentic content).

At least it will take away the incentive from the all-powerful tech companies to stop pushing and optimizing political messages with their core-business interest. If they can&#x27;t make money off of it, I&#x27;m sure these botnets will get more attention from their anti-abuse teams.

They&#x27;ve been going after bots and sockpuppets too when they find them. Either way at least removing the ability to forcibly promote ads in front of certain groups now they have to do that targeting themselves and it&#x27;s more out in the open where it can be called out unlike the ads which you wouldn&#x27;t see unless you were targeted.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;twitter-world-leaders-break-rules&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;15&#x2F;twitter-world-leaders-brea...</a>He’s blocking that too

One of the key aspects of political content on social media is that you don&#x27;t necessarily need to buy ads to get your message in front of people.  You can instead pay for an army of bots to spread your message and make it appear as genuine user generated content rather than a prepackaged advertisement.  So while this decision by Twitter is in my opinion good, what are they doing to cut down on inauthentic political engagement that has become a hallmark of the platform?

Kudos to Jack for this step. it will put pressure on FB to act responsibly. however Now the debate will shift to what is a political ad. its like superpac and political party symbiosis again

There was a campaign finance law in 1971 that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. In Buckley v. Valeo, the US Supreme Court ruled that campaign finance laws are freedom of speech, in that without such laws, the every day person is restricted from being heard when the wealthy are allowed to use money beyond what the common person can pay. Because of this, the court upheld limits on contributions to candidates ruling campaign finance is legal, as long as it is limited to an amount everyone can participate in.From the Supreme Court: &quot;The Court affirmed a First Amendment interest in spending money to facilitate campaign speech, writing, &quot;A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.&quot; Further, the law&#x27;s &quot;$1,000 ceiling on spending &#x27;relative to a clearly identified candidate,&#x27; would appear to exclude all citizens and groups except candidates, political parties, and the institutional press from any significant use of the most effective modes of communication.&quot;The Court upheld limits on contributions to candidates.For more information checkout: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Buckley_v._Valeo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Buckley_v._Valeo</a>edit: In 2002 there was another campaign finance law that went to the Supreme Court, again for freedom of speech. In McConnell v. FEC, the court ruled, &quot;the need to control corruption overshadowes any minor threat to free speech&quot;.

Political ads are &quot;paid&quot; free speech.

Campaign finance is illegal in most of the first world. If political ads were banned in the US, politicians wouldn&#x27;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.

Twitter has been famously hugely toxic to humanity and democracy for years, and that was strictly on the non-ads side of content, and Dorsey has refused to do anything about it because he craves those engagement numbers. Paid ads are a sideshow distraction.

I don&#x27;t follow politics nor do I follow these discussions, but I wonder how many people are influenced from a politic ad vs how many people are influenced from bots. I&#x27;d _guess_ bots are much much much much more influential.

Good for them, and good for us. Without controlling bots and sockpuppets, it&#x27;s not a total fix. Still, a step in the right direction.Given the larger overlap between Facebook users and people who vote, we&#x27;ll need follow-up from Zuckerberg to really make this stick. Step in the right direction.

They also say that they don&#x27;t want money to be giving uneven power to politicians, but that&#x27;s totally happening without ads.

&gt; Will they also ban politicians?I don&#x27;t think they will. &#x27;Politicians ban&#x27; will be equivalent to banning free expression, and twitter is against that.

So be it. At least from their business side, they are clearing themselves of responsibility. They are a company, they dont have a duty to arbitrate political discourse in general.

Accounts can artificially inflate their follower count with money, but they can&#x27;t use money to make _me_ follow them. I think that&#x27;s the difference with paid advertising, where you can buy the ability to reach anyone.

Quote from Jack&gt; We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.Will they also ban politicians? Accounts buy followers to grow and look legit, including politicians. Just removing ads isn&#x27;t removing power of money, as people are (and will be) spending a lot of money to get organic reach.Some of their most popular accounts are politicians accounts. That brings tons of traffic to Twitter and makes money for them.While I don&#x27;t disagree with their decision, I think they maybe overstating positive impact it&#x27;ll have.

There&#x27;s really no reason to run political ads on Twitter, and I doubt Twitter would have made this decision if it actually hurt them financially in any meaningful way. Politics on Twitter is quite simple, say something and get your crowd to retweet it. AOC and Trump are the masters of this, they get a lot of political messages&#x2F;lies&#x2F;misleading messages out, and they don&#x27;t spend a dime on it. Facebook is a different animal altogether in terms of politics.

Agreed, just keep filling in holes until it’s impractical to dig new ones.

ITT: They&#x27;ll switch to bots! They&#x27;ll just start doing x!So? We can address that when we get there. This is a step in the right direction for once.

I&#x27;m skeptical of this.  Is a private charity promoting an LGBT fundraiser a political ad?  What about Fox News pushing an ad about how other news is fake.  Or MSNBC pushing an ad about Russia collusion?  Was the now infamous Gillette woke ad political?  It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how this all plays out.

&gt; Which I cannot read in any way but “f-you, Facebook.”He was even more explicit:&gt; 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! ”

&gt; This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handleLet&#x27;s just keep in mind that Trump spent way less on the election in total than Clinton did.

Those advertising methods don&#x27;t allow you to micro-target based on people&#x27;s private behavior. Micro-targeting and machine learning lets campaigns (like Cambridge Analytica&#x27;s) generate what&#x27;s effectively a thousand different campaigns, targeting exactly what triggers specific people the most. There&#x27;s absolutely nothing stopping them from saying the exact opposite thing to two different people. That&#x27;s what our current institutions may not be prepared to handle.

&gt; And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. [...] This issue is NOT about freedom of expression...it’s about freedom to pay for expression (and freedom to pay for having others see your expression), and I don’t think that’s inherently a good thing. It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about.Doesn&#x27;t the same argument also apply to ads in radio, TV, newspapers, mass mailing, email campaigns, and paying a guy to hand out brochures? Would you agree that it is equally bad to allow political ads in all these contexts? Genuinely curious here if the principle is meant to be applied consistently, or if the internet is different somehow.

Already against the TOS, and they already do that.

the use of fake account swarms to spread political ideology seems the more powerful use of twitter than legitimate ads. will we see a correspondingly brave effort to delete fake accounts?

Twitter&#x27;s entire net revenue isa small line item to google and youtube.  Saying fuck you and being a small fraction of your opposition is not brave and totally useless.

Thought I don&#x27;t have an objection to Twitter not accepting political advertising, their rationalization sounds like they&#x27;re saying voters are too stupid to figure out what to believe so it&#x27;s best if they are put in a bubble. It&#x27;s interesting how closely this matches the arguments against labeling GMO foods because consumers are too stupid to decide for themselves if GMO food is harmless or not.We love democracy. We love freedom. We love choice. But mostly in theory and not so much in practice when it comes to the masses. Anyone seen Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball hanging around?

&gt;puts democracy above profitsIn fairness Twitter has been public since 2013 and in that time only turned a profit in 1 year.These ads wouldn&#x27;t make or break them, and its far more valuable to get the PR while FB is in the media for the same issue.

You can block stuff on your phone browser too. uBlock Origin works on Firefox Mobile.

Great.  I think I already have just about all of them blocked anyway, and I only ever seem to see unsolicited ads on Twitter on my phone browser - UBlock Origin seems to be highly competent at wiping out all sponsored Tweets, root and nail, in desktop Chrome.

The contrarian view is that banning political advertising favors incumbents in elections.The incumbents are already known. Challengers have to make themselves known, and paid advertising is one of the main ways that is possible.

Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum - it&#x27;s really inspiring to see a company take a stand against political advertising, if it can&#x27;t be properly vetted. One more step to strengthen our democracy.

Speaking of &#x27;Paying for reach&#x27;. The Supreme Court said (in 2014) there should be no limit on how much an individual can contribute to campaigns (money that is used to buy reach) - And Corporations are legal persons - so... 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;supreme-court-ruling-on-campaign-contributions.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;supreme-court...</a>

&gt; Only one country has the first amendmentDo you think other countries don&#x27;t have freedom of speech or freedom of the press?

&gt; It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about.Only one country has the first amendment, and this decision from twitter is globally applicable, so it shouldn&#x27;t factor into the decision.

&gt;It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about.&gt;Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people to peaceably assemble...Press is pay to express. Only difference is the scale and price.

TikTok also bans political advertising.Are there any other companies?

Given that practically for any issue of importance there&#x27;s enough money on each side of the issue to buy a campaign on Twitter, it doesn&#x27;t really matter. But if Twitter doesn&#x27;t want to take money that would expose them to pressure over banning somebody&#x27;s political speech (somehow nowadays it became ok in the US of A to call to ban your political opponent from speaking - who could have known that&#x27;d happen?) - it can be a sensible solution. Twitter would still be pressured to ban for politics (and probably would yield to that pressure, as it did many times before) but at least their revenue department would be kept out of this mess.

Years ago I ran across a quote that went something like &quot;Freedom of Speech gives you the right to own a printing press, not the right to use mine.&quot; I wish I could track down who said it.That&#x27;s basically what Jack is saying too. I don&#x27;t see how &quot;Freedom of the Press&quot; could be construed to mean that publishers are obligated to run any ad that somebody is willing to pay for. That&#x27;s never been the case.

&gt; It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about.Freedom of the Press has always been about expression and the ability to pay for reach. Printing presses were - and are - horrendously expensive.

I just found the perfect way to sum this all up and I&#x27;m making a prediction: NRA ads will be banned on twitter but Planned Parenthood ads will not. The total lack of self reflection and thinking on part of Twitter is really something else. Facebook made the right decision, Twitter made the wrong decision. It cannot be more obvious.

Bravo. That whole thread is smart, well-reasoned, and puts democracy above profits. Good for them.I particularly like his last point:&gt; A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.Which I cannot read in any way but “f-you, Facebook.”And honestly, he’s totally right. This issue is NOT about freedom of expression...it’s about freedom to pay for expression (and freedom to pay for having others see your expression), and I don’t think that’s inherently a good thing. It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about.

What ads aren&#x27;t political? At this point, when politicians are just reputation-laundering spokespersons for multinational financial interests, it makes no difference whether you advertise for the candidate or the product.Perhaps this will disincentivize investment in electoral politics, but it won&#x27;t rescue the public discourse from financiers&#x27; influence.

It is not enough because the true goal of moderation is not to hide content people don&#x27;t like, but to lock out people the majority of people don&#x27;t like so they can&#x27;t communicate or work together to spread their (probably hateful) message.Putting it on a blockchain is abdicating responsibility for any and all content, saying &quot;hey, we just wrote the code, we don&#x27;t store or propagate any of this ourselves.&quot;

Yeah, but then they could be ordered to take it down. I think the idea is to be censorship resistant in such a way that the company itself cannot make exceptions when pressured by a court, but I&#x27;m forgetting if that&#x27;s me reading between the lines or if Dorsey explicitly talks about censorship resistance.

I&#x27;m not sure why a blockchain is needed for this. Can&#x27;t they just have an API where certain posts are &quot;flagged&quot; and hidden in the official UI? If you want to opt-out, you simply use a UI that doesn&#x27;t hide flagged.

My impression of Dorsey is that he doesn&#x27;t really know anything but me makes statements (like the OP, and the Bitcoin gunk, and making Twitter more &quot;conversational&quot;) that don&#x27;t make sense or stand up to scrutiny, but use a bunch of words that try to convey a position of leadership on not topics.

That was my impression as well.  It was interesting to see Jack answer and then have the legal council (?) amend Jack&#x27;s answers or push them in a specific direction.  It&#x27;s very clear that there is a mismatch between what Jack wants, what Twitter shareholders want, and what Twitter&#x27;s activist pseudo-employee contingent wants.

Inmates - does this means the legal team?

From what I recall in the JRE and Sam Harris interviews, Jack seemed very reasonable. I think Twitter is something that&#x27;s gotten away from him (certainly from what he&#x27;d like) and is being run by the inmates to a significant degree.

However shouldn’t the president have a “megaphone?” In the old days, when a president spoke, the media would “interpret” what he said. Politicians being able to speak directly to the population is a good thing.

&gt; Dorsey espouses some very libertarian views and yet he&#x27;s generally leaning left of courseSince the left has a embraced intersectionality, you can&#x27;t be a &quot;libertarian&quot; and lean &quot;left&quot;, that&#x27;s completely incompatible, or I&#x27;m not sure what left you are talking about. That Dorsey puts up a facade because he lives in the silicon valley? sure, just like the higher ups at Alphabet.

&gt; and yet he&#x27;s generally leaning left of courseWords clearly do not have meanings anymore

It does not take a whole lot of courage to give a megaphone to someone who&#x27;s making you millions.

Dorsey espouses some very libertarian views and yet he&#x27;s generally leaning left of course. Still , he s the only one who dares give Trump a megaphone. I think he handles the whole situation exceptionally well.

Author Moderated Replies
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;TwitterCanada&#x2F;status&#x2F;1149327628106641408" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;TwitterCanada&#x2F;status&#x2F;1149327628106641408</a>

I don&#x27;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 okay by Twitter&#x27;s standards, but obviously they&#x27;re still currently taking down content that breaches their policies in $CURRENT_YEAR. I&#x27;m really interested in seeing where Twitter goes, I think Dorsey plays realpolitik sometimes but I don&#x27;t think he has the same goals as Zuckerberg. I could be wrong, and Dorsey could just be a next-level showman, but I&#x27;m hopeful that he might do something truly interesting with the platform. I&#x27;ve still never made a Twitter account.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;_mP9OmOFxc4a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;_mP9OmOFxc4a</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;DZCBRHOg3PQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;DZCBRHOg3PQ</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;talesfromthecrypt.libsyn.com&#x2F;tales-from-the-crypt-61-jack-dorsey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;talesfromthecrypt.libsyn.com&#x2F;tales-from-the-crypt-61...</a>

Twitter doesn’t have much political advertising, unlike its rival. This is a probably very effective PR move more than anything. Timed to coincide with FB’s earnings no less.

I recently started running ads for a company I own. I&#x27;ll keep it vague but, the company is just a SaaS for tracking legislation in a certain interesting way.Annoyingly, Facebook decided that I was advertising Political content, and therefor requires a whole series of additional verification steps, as well as a disclaimer of the fashion &quot;Payed for By _______&quot; right beneath my ad.Needless to say, it gives my advertisement a feel which I don&#x27;t think it should have. It&#x27;s not a political advertisement. Nor is it about a political, or social issue. Nor does it promote anything - campaign, legislation, or otherwise.It&#x27;s an ad, for an app, that provides access to data in a totally unbiased (and unaltered) way.TLDR; These companies are casting a really wide net in the wake of the election ads scandal. Unfortunately, some people are getting targeted who (IMO) shouldn&#x27;t be and there&#x27;s ZERO recourse. No phone number to call, no rep I can explain things to, nothing. I appealed the decision and it was - no joke - instantly denied. If twitter is anything like Facebook, this means I can no longer advertise my app on twitter. Lame.

And of course this has the consequence of reinforcing the entrenched players with large follower counts’ messages.

It&#x27;s also a smart business decision. Avoiding the entire scrutiny and questions of regulation is worth more than the (modest) amounts spent on online political advertising.

Genuinely impressed by this statement. They seem to have put some real thought into this, and like it or not, they&#x27;re an advertising company rejecting business for what they see as the greater good. Bravo.

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.

Salute to Twitter for doing something proactive and not just reacting post facto. That&#x27;s what leadership is.

So only pro-consumerism political ads are allowed now.So Toyota can buy ads to promote their gas burning cars, but I can&#x27;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?

&gt; one could imagine a hack of defining political ads as &quot;anything that would need to be reported to the FEC as an expenditure.&quot;That misses a whole bunch of political advertising. Most of it, I&#x27;d wager.

The difficulty is that we once used propaganda in war time, because we needed it. The problem now is that you don’t know who is doing it, and for what.And propaganda back then wasn’t so clear cut. We were allied with Russia and at the end their population was truly decimated.

I completely agree with what you&#x27;re saying about the difficulty of cleanly separating political vs nonpolitical speech, but for specifically the case of U.S. political issues, one could imagine a hack of defining political ads as &quot;anything that would need to be reported to the FEC as an expenditure.&quot;

I generally comprehend &quot;grandstanding&quot; in the common language to not only be seeking attention but to misrepresent false or unimportant information for the sake of gaining that attention. Does my definition mesh with yours or how would you find that quote to be misrepresenting a problem in society?While her question could seem to be reductive, I think it&#x27;s accurately reducing the question to a point where the answer is easily approachable to most people and, while often time the actual advertisements less obvious lies in practice, a lot of facebook advertisements are knowingly spreading falsehoods and that is hurting the political dialog.

Obviously such questions were manipulative grandstanding. The only way to win the political rhetoric game is not to play. That&#x27;s what twitter is doing.

Who should adjudicate what is an is not a lie? Twitter’s response is basically “we don’t want to be the ones to do that”

There&#x27;s a difference between opinion and facts&#x2F;lies. Opinion is fine, but when someone is spreading an objective lie (the earth is flat!)... that&#x27;s where it seems like this is a cop out for Facebook to pretend they can&#x27;t get involved due to &quot;free speech&quot;. Sure, let people share opinions, but not lies and misinformation.

Here is the full video of the &quot;Conservatives for a Green New Deal&quot; ad by the Really Online Lefty League PAC:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;cvRbZJXTE5E" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;cvRbZJXTE5E</a>

Someone tried to put up that ad and Facebook took it down. But wasn&#x27;t it &quot;just&quot; deceptive clickbait advertising for a political position against Facebook? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-usa-election-facebook&#x2F;facebook-takes-down-false-ad-from-pac-on-republican-graham-idUSKBN1X50IZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;us-usa-election-facebook&#x2F;fac...</a>

The issue is who gets to be the arbiter of what counts as &quot;political propaganda and deliberate lies&quot;?The founding fathers thought that if government was given such power it would be abused to stifle speech that fell outside of those categories so the only way to protect speech was to protect it all.I tend to think that if this is true for government, it&#x27;s probably true for large corporations as well.

What do you think of a world where Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan get to decide what is and isn’t “political propaganda and deliberate lies”? Because until very recently, they were “the government.”

Yes, the founding fathers were trying to protect freedom of religion, which is exactly what you just described. Do you have a problem with that?

Are political propaganda and deliberate lies the type of speech the Founding Fathers were trying to protect?

&gt; &quot;should a political party be allowed to run targeted ads at members of the opposing party, giving false information about the election date?&quot;Would that actually be legal? Are you allowed to try to suppress the vote like that?

I believe Zuckerberg&#x27;s answer to that question was that such an ad would be banned. It&#x27;s an explicit exception in the policy that permits lying in political ads, an exception that bans lies in service of voter suppression.To the broader question, about whether all lies in political ads should be banned, the free speech argument against is that while it&#x27;s easy to invent easy and obvious cases of lying, enforcing that policy in reality is very difficult and puts Facebook in the position of censoring speech that one side may consider a truth and the other may consider a lie.

Sure outright lying in a way that can put someone in danger (e.g. printing false instruction on medical drug) should not be allowed. 
The question is what should be the mechanism to do that. One way is to use courts, where everyone will get a fair hearing, rules will be the same for everybody, and won&#x27;t change often. Another is to use Facebook moderators as judges, which does not seem to be a very promising path.

One of the better questions she asked was, &quot;should a political party be allowed to run targeted ads at members of the opposing party, giving false information about the election date?&quot;Zuck&#x27;s response was, &quot;well, I think it&#x27;s BAD if you LIE. Telling lies is bad.&quot; but wouldn&#x27;t say that Facebook would moderate that kind of content.I personally don&#x27;t see a legitimate free speech claim saying that political parties should be allowed to target opponents with plain, simple falsehoods like that (which already happen through the mail system, mind), but I&#x27;m open to hear.I ask because speech is already restricted when it comes to advertising; companies are compelled to put up disclaimers, the FTC will come down on misleading ads, etc.So, if society&#x27;s surviving okay with those restrictions, is there a reason that political chicanery shouldn&#x27;t be held to some standard also?What is the free speech argument for not drawing a line at that?

For the record, the &quot;yelling fire in a crowded theater&quot; example came from one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time, which sent a man to jail for distributing anti-draft literature during WWI.  The parent comment isn&#x27;t necessarily guilty of this, but I&#x27;ve noticed that the people who approvingly quote Oliver Wendell Holmes as a justification for restrictions on free speech almost invariably have no clue about the historical context.

&gt; Determining the periphery of political speech,as a result, would be inherently political.And, choosing not to determine the peripherey of political speech, is also political. Inaction is a choice, which by its nature supports the status quo.I am not saying inaction, or the status quo, is necessarily good or bad, although I don&#x27;t agree with the implication in the parent post that Facebook shouldn&#x27;t do something.What should be done is delicate and will always require constant negotiation, and be in flux. I am a proponent of free speech. Yelling &quot;fire&quot; in a crowded theater, is, of course, a classic example of a &quot;surpression&quot; of speech, and, the history of the US court system in ruling that books which were banned are legal to publish, etc, is a good example that our legal system has tools to negotiate these issues and can do so.

What I saw was that AOC very effectively got him to admit that they already will do it in certain cases. He admitted that if someone tried to place an ad that contributed to voter suppression (by misreporting the date of the election), that would be banned.

would already greatly diminish the effect. Two hops away is a magnitude or two less of exposure.When Spain changed organ donations from opt-in to opt-out the rate increased from 30% to 9x%. That&#x27;s one tick of a box.I see these comments a lot and I don&#x27;t know if people purposefully try to downplay the role of smart design because they pursue an agenda or if people seriously don&#x27;t recognise how significant small changes in design can be.If we&#x27;d manage to hide false information behind two clicks we&#x27;d have done the world a great service.

&quot;The Green New Deal. Who really supports it? Click here to find out more.&quot;Just move the propaganda two hops away.

If you promise to chop down all forests but are fine with trees, yes.

This exact topic is covered in Wittgenstein&#x27;s Philosophical Investigations, and the answer is that the concept of forest is not defined by such a condition. It is a basket of examples of forests and identifying a new example in the basket is done by means of analogy to the existing examples.It is therefore possible for a concept to grow to include contradictory examples, at which point people will typically split the basket into two distinct concepts, like a forest vs a grove. The point at which that happens is somewhat arbitrary, but it also doesn&#x27;t exist a priori. Someone has to try to use the word ambiguously. Words don&#x27;t have meanings until they are used by people to mean.It is even possible for a distinction to not be made, and for someone to experience cognitive dissonance when two contradictory examples remain in the same basket.

Many trees constitute a forest. A single tree does not. At some point, a group of trees becomes large enough to be considered a forest. There is no way to provide any non-arbitrary rule where that point is.Does this render the concept of a &quot;forest&quot; meaningless?

The cream should eventually rise to the top. Political ads are now archived for anyone to scrutinize. If a politician kept releasing ridiculous ads, voters and the general public would likely know about the existence at least. Censoring ads opens up a much larger can of worms IMO. &quot;Republicans back the green deal&quot; could mean:a. Congressional Republican majority
b. Some elected Republicans
c. A group of Republican votersIf AOC ran that ad, it very well would be truthful for B and C, but should Facebook interpret the ad as describing A? There&#x27;s way too much nuance to be the single arbitrator.

&gt; What about the other extreme, where every political ad contains blatant lies because anyone who doesn&#x27;t do that cannot possibly get elected?Basically an arms race of lies, where those willing to lie the most have the greatest advantage. What&#x27;s worse is that the most insidious of the lies will appeal to the parts of the targets&#x27; psyches that wants very much to believe the lies, and therefore unlikely to proactively fact check (i.e Pizzagate).And as has been the trend of late, lies that are eventually publicly debunked will be minimized as being &quot;just jokes&quot;.

Okay, you can point out one extreme side of the continuum. What about the other extreme, where every political ad contains blatant lies because anyone who doesn&#x27;t do that cannot possibly get elected?&gt; I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficult to determine. Even when truth is easy to determine, there are few arbiters of information that everyone alongside the aisle trust.This is true, of course, but why is this such a serious or novel concern? All criminal trials, for instance, require making a judgement on the truth about reality. Of course some cases are very hard, and sometimes we get the wrong outcome. But what else do you suggest? That no one ever attempt to determine anything about reality?

So Facebook should be regulated as a publisher?

One persons &quot;suppression of speech&quot; is another persons right to not publish and spread that persons bullshit.This is why people always bring up that the &quot;Free speech&quot; is a concept that applies to governments(never-mind the historical origins in ancient Athens which was largely around protecting political discourse and dissent from prosecution..). Like many restrictions placed on the government it falls apart and becomes contradictory when applied to the individual.

&quot;binary judgement of truth&quot;I think people should be more comfortable with non-binary truth, based on the likelihood that something is a lie or not based on historical record. I would put more trust in a statement from someone with a record of telling unbiased truth versus someone with a record of frequently spewing lies or having ingrained bias.Otherwise, if you don&#x27;t make these types of initial simplifications, it becomes too complicated to start evaluating the truth of any statement, including scientific ones. And it&#x27;s okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified &quot;truth&quot; assessment model based on more recent data.There is a danger in deferring a &quot;truth&quot; assessment: a community loses a sense of shared truth leading to polarization, doubt, confusion. And a so-called &quot;neutral&quot; person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.

1) Get sympathetic media to print a claim2) Plaster claim over grainy black-and-white photo, with attribution. Run TV&#x2F;internet campaign with it.If you&#x27;re having a lawyerly debate about the technicalities of the accusation, you&#x27;ve already lost.

“X supports the Green New Deal” is indeed highly subjective for some values of X.  But that doesn’t include most Republicans, who have been consistently against the whole thing from start to finish.

&gt; I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech.I had a bit of a different take. I actually think even this simple statement is incredibly difficult to verify.First, we have to define what the Green New Deal even is. I don&#x27;t mean this to be snarky, but even that is difficult.Then we have to define what support means. Does it mean positive comments in the press? Do we need to go lookup in Lexis-Nexis every statement the candidate has made about the Green New Deal?Even if we limit it to actual votes, it&#x27;s still problematic. Did the candidate vote for the markup in committee? Did they vote to move it to the floor? In the Senate, did they vote for cloture, but vote against it on the floor? Did they vote for the bill out of conference?Some might recall, we spent a good portion of the 2004 campaign arguing over whether John Kerry voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it.This stuff is extremely subjective. It&#x27;s probably something like a day&#x27;s work for a seasoned reporter to accurately fact check a claim like this, and even then it&#x27;s open to interpretation, which is easy enough to express in a fact check, but pretty hard in a binary judgement of truth.

That depends on what we mean by &quot;successful.&quot; The early chans were very moderation free -- 4chan initially didn&#x27;t censor, then they started censoring furry content but not pedo content, then the furry ban got removed, then the pedo ban finally kicked in, and they&#x27;ve had more censorship since... but the initial seed was practically not moderated, and most of the moderation that has been put in place since seems like a result of legal fears (the brief furry ban being an obvious exception). The bitmessage chans are still moderation free, and will be as long as the bitmessage network has nodes, but of course that can&#x27;t scale (for anyone unfamiliar, every bitmessage node tries to decrypt every message -- this means that there is no need for metadata concerning where a message was sent to, and since packets are forwarded across the network you&#x27;d have to be running multiple nodes to even guess where a message is coming from, but there&#x27;s no way that everybody could recieve and try to decrypt everybody else&#x27;s messages if the whole world used such a system). I&#x27;m not arguing that I want a system without moderation, just that such communities have existed, have grown, and do exist. My ideal would be a community with opt-in&#x2F;opt-out moderation, but I also don&#x27;t wish every community to reflect my ideals.

There will never be a successful community without some level of moderation. It is better for us to define the levels of moderation than have a organization start adjudicating truth.

It&#x27;s still not easy.  Suppose I write a bot that flags all of my competitors ads a political?

All advertising is incredibly political, because companies operate in a politicized world.Under this guidance for example, Shell could advertise all they want on twitter, but running an ad against Shell about how they pollute the environment or contribute to global warming would be banned.So then your options are to ban all advertising, or be selective in what advertising you allow. Which is inherently a political position.

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 &#x2F; not true out of it and just remove the political advertisements all together.

I agree with your general points, but I&#x27;ll argue against their relative priority.You&#x27;re saying that all speech is somehow political. I agree. Yet you must admit that on an advertising platform, there are some forms of political speech (e.g., the type allowed by ad buys) that, in lieu of some external regulation, will be _inherently_ biased. That is, the economic arrangement can only pit one group against another.The only _true_ solution to this problem is a platform where the stakeholders (users) also govern all parts of the platform like a common pooled resource. But we know this cannot happen because, well, capitalism.So I do not discount your claim that all goings-on in public fora are inherently political, I&#x27;ll just pit two concrete facts against your abstract observation: 1) limiting political ad buys will be less bad than not limiting political ad buys and 2 we can only start really reasoning about your abstract concept of relative existential truths after we fundamentally fix a fundamentally broken economic and technical arrangement.

This point of view is kinda incoherent. These platforms are not open. They&#x27;re owned. And the owners can decide what you can and cannot say on it. In the end, if they think that some kinds of expression are not good for them, they not only have the right, but from a corporate perspective, a responsibility to their enterprise to end that expression on their platform.Pressure from lawmakers and the public alike can change their policies. And we can always vote with our feet.

She also asked if it’d be OK to advertise the wrong date for Election Day in a predominantly black zip code for example which I can totally see as a possibility.

I’d take it a step further and limit who is allowed to vote. You mention competent adults; an adult in 1800 was probably competent around 16 years of age. An adult today is similarly competent at a later age.Regardless of competency, there should be some eligibility requirements to vote. Holding a job should be one. Proof of citizenship should be another.

The entire point is that more money doesn’t lead to disproportionately more speech.And if readers were ‘mostly competent’, and able to decipher the truth, we wouldn’t even be having this convo

How about ... freedom of speech?Quit trying to micro manage everyone.Accept payment to publish messages on a competitive platform - and let readers, being mostly competent adults, figure content out themselves.

It’s not weird at all, it’s a power grab. The politicians want to use social media as an excuse to become arbiters of the truth.It’s repulsive and short-sighted, it appears to me they have forgotten or disregarded the old adage to not claim a new power you wouldn’t trust your opponents with.

That&#x27;s what confuses me, a bit. Consider just as a hypothetical that Facebook is the single most unethical company on earth. Just as an example, whether you agree with it or not. I still wouldn&#x27;t necessarily agree with what&#x27;s being asked of them, to actively disallow political ads with lies. I think there&#x27;s a good case to be made for just not having political ads (because of all the reasons you&#x27;d expect)... but I can understand having them, too, and it&#x27;s a bit weird to me as someone who doesn&#x27;t like a lot of what FB does to see the politicians die on the hill of &quot;you must fact check everything&quot;

after reading Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier I have come to realize that trust is a really difficult thing to implement online.  Look at how hard it is for Amazon to police counterfeit items or fake reviews.

Although a popular meme like the platform&#x2F;publisher duality it isn&#x27;t a valid concept legally - at least in the US conception. Not any more than being able to get away with specific death threats as &quot;a promise&quot;. That sort of &quot;marginal loophole&quot; is frowned upon in the jurisprudence period. The prevailing form of restrictions that have survived are specific and tailored invalidations of forms of speech protection - threats, fraud, and libel.Not to say that special pleading for abridging rights hasn&#x27;t embedded itself via ex-nilho doctrines turned precedent.

It&#x27;s not the suppression of speech. It&#x27;s the regulation of speech amplification, especially paid amplification.The concept of fraud and libel are related too. It is fraudulent to claim you are someone that you are not.

From what I recall Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez questioned Zuckerberg, she questioned along the anecdote of:If I purchase ads on Facebook saying Republicans support the Green New Deal (but they don&#x27;t), will Facebook take the ads down?I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficult to determine. Even when truth is easy to determine, there are few arbiters of information that everyone alongside the aisle trust. As a result, no matter how easy or difficult truth is to find, without trust no one will believe the truth even if they hear it clearly.I find political speech pervasive, and believe that almost everything a person says or does has some political element. Determining the periphery of political speech,as a result, would be inherently political.

Twitter to ban political advertising