Twitter’s political advertising ban puts ball in Facebook’s court

“Twitter now provides an alternative case that advocates and reformers can potentially make against Facebook and look to to hold them accountable,” said Daniel Kreiss, a media and journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I think you will see the ratcheting up of political pressure and potentially regulatory pressure on Facebook.”

The announcement from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to no longer accept political ads came in a string of tweets, some of which were aimed at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, though he wasn’t mentioned by name.

“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!’” Dorsey wrote, adding the issue of political advertising “isn’t about free expression,” a shot at Zuckerberg’s defense of his own company’s policy.

“This is about paying for reach,” the Twitter chief tweeted. “And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.”

The ban on political ads from Twitter prompted cheers from former and current politicians, who collectively turned to Zuckerberg to ask what he was going to do next.

“This is the right thing to do for democracy in America and all over the world,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted. “What say you, @Facebook?”

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang called Twitter’s move “the rare triumph of the public good over the bottom line.”

“I hope Facebook follows suit or at least verifies and stands by the accuracy of political ads on its platform,” he tweeted.

Twitter and Facebook have positioned themselves at the extremes for how tech companies handle political ads. While Twitter is ending political advertisements outright, Facebook is taking a hands-off approach to political speech and allowing politicians to lie in ads.

But Kreiss said there are positions in the middle that “would have bipartisan support,” such as allowing political ads but restricting the use of custom advertising tools, which allow campaigns to target specific subsets of users. This feature in part has made Facebook an advertising behemoth for campaigns.

“It’s reasonable. I think it’s best for them as a business,” he said. “They’re accountable to shareholders and get to run their platform companies as they see fit. I think there’s a sensible middle here.”

Since Facebook revealed speech from politicians would not be subject to the same standards as other users, the company has been facing internal and external pressure to reverse course.

A group of more than 250 Facebook employees criticized the company’s decision to hold politicians to fewer restrictions on the content they include in ads in an open letter to Zuckerberg and other Facebook leaders this week. Lawmakers and 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, meanwhile, are urging the social media giant to reconsider its policy and begin fact-checking political ads.

The criticisms come as the 2020 election is heating up, and Facebook has been working to ensure foreign actors can’t use disinformation campaigns to interfere in the election, as Russia did in 2016. But opponents of the policy say Facebook is approving the spread of false information by U.S. political campaigns instead.

The boundaries of the political ad guidelines are already being tested. Last week, The Really Online Lefty League, a liberal political action committee, ran an ad erroneously claiming Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, backed the Green New Deal.

The ad was rated false by a third-party fact-checker that works with Facebook, and the ad was removed. Because it was posted not by a politician, but a third party, the content was subject to vetting for false or misleading information.

So far, the assaults on Facebook have done little to sway Zuckerberg.

In an earnings call with investors Wednesday, the Facebook founder said the ads from politicians will make up less than 0.5% of the company’s revenue in 2020, indicating the company’s policy is not rooted in a desire to make more money, as some lawmakers have charged.

“To put this in perspective, the FTC fine that these same critics said wouldn’t be enough to change our incentives was 10x bigger than this,” Zuckerberg said, referencing Facebook’s $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission for privacy missteps. “So the reality is that we believe deeply the political speech is important, and that’s what’s driving this.”

Zuckerberg told Congress last week Facebook opted not to police content from politicians and campaigns because “in a democracy, it is important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying.”

Campbell Brown, a former CNN journalist and Facebook’s head of news partnerships, also defended the decision for the social media giant not to fact-check ads from elected officials.

“I have been astonished at the reaction by other journalists to Facebook’s decision not to police speech from political candidates,” Brown said in a post on Facebook. “I strongly believe it should be the role of the press to dissect the truth or lies found in political ads — not engineers at a tech company.”

While many of Facebook’s biggest critics have applauded Twitter’s decision to no longer accept political ads, there was one notable dissenter: the Trump campaign.

“Twitter just walked away from hundreds of millions of dollars of potential revenue, a very dumb decision for their stockholders,” campaign manager Brad Parscale said. “Will Twitter also be stopping ads from biased liberal media outlets who will now run unchecked as they buy obvious political content meant to attack Republicans?”

Parscale said the move was the latest effort to “silence conservatives, since Twitter knows President Trump has the most sophisticated online program ever known.”

It’s unlikely Twitter’s ban, however, will keep the president from using the platform despite the complaints from his reelection campaign. Trump has more than 66 million followers and frequently uses the site to air grievances and make personnel and policy announcements.

Lee Goodman, a Republican who served as chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said Twitter’s decision likely was made after weighing the “political ad revenues versus the costs visited by official political harassment and retaliation.”

“They decided the political costs outweighed ad revenues,” he said. “This is the outcome that many politicians intended — to shut down avenues of populist speech they don’t like, especially criticism of politicians. Politicians have browbeaten media companies to the point they would rather close their platforms.”