Updating our advertising policies on state media
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
Those PACs were likely already going to propagandize. It's not like they suddenly become more powerful or concentrated because the state media promoted posts that happened to align with them disappeared.
Also in some instances like foreign influence (e.g. the HK protests and surrounding state ad campaigns from which this policy ostensibly stems), there may not even be a corresponding PAC. So shutting down that advertising could be surprisingly significant.
But in the end, the effectiveness of regulation is proportional to the degree of effort avoidance or circumvention requires. I say, "Twitter: good call." Let states speak for themselves.
Nation states however have no such right. Thus the ability to bar their propaganda is much lower, as it should be.
edit: limit to bar in p2
You can't pay for votes, you can't have someone sign their vote-by-mail ballot and fill it in for them, you can't vote in-person in someone else's stead (even though it doesn't create an extra vote), and so on. There are also plenty of restrictions (at least in the text of the law) on how to handle the ballots themselves.
None of these are restrictions on the right to vote.
For example, "do not criminalize weed, because it will push incentives past a tipping point for the opening of unregulated cross-border trade routes".
Decisions are not made in a vacuum, there are always fringe effects.
I also wonder if they consider owned by the head of state to be state-controlled (e.g. RT, Al-Jazeera)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323322256_Media_Pol...
e: My mistake, thought you were talking about my point, not about Twitter's policy.
Rather than pretending to be unbiased, I'd rather my news sources disclosed their biases clearly so that I can take them into account.
That would effectively ban any publicly traded news like Fox, CNN, etc, wouldn't it? I'd assume most American politicians own shares or invest in indexes that do (like the S&P 500). Unless you define ownership as majority share or something.
I don't think any of the entities you are referring to qualify based on this definition.
But Freedom House is US government funded, a lot of studies have shown it's biased toward countries that are aligned with us foreign policy.
Missing the forest for a tree a bit here.
"This policy will not apply to taxpayer-funded entities, including independent public broadcasters"
Seems like a pretty big loophole for a bad actor to jump through.
> They will have 30 days to offboard from our advertising products, after which we will stringently enforce these policies.
Means it probably won't apply to the Hong Kong propaganda, which is what brought it to people's attention in the first place.
So these protests will likely continue off and on for years.
Now that China is using historically corporate channels of propaganda, I hope that we can all realize that we need to close them, not just to foreign states but also to the corporations who were abusing them originally.
> This policy will not apply to taxpayer-funded entities, including independent public broadcasters.
So quite probably no, since the BBC is an independent public broadcaster (much like NPR in the US) - it is state funded but not directly controlled by the state; it maintains editorial independence.
Of course conclusively defining editorial independence seems like quite a non-trivial task. It's made even more confusing by the fact that it goes on to state:
> This policy will apply to news media entities that are either financially or editorially controlled by the state.
While the BBC and other taxpayer funded independent public broadcasters are not editorially controlled by the state, isn't being taxpayer funded synonymous with being controlled financially by the state?
Compare these two scenarios:
• I, an advertiser, give YouTube $20. YouTube decides to not give the content-creator on whose media my ads ran that $20. That's up to them, because YouTube controls the relationship. I, as an advertiser, don't even really have a relationship with content creators; I just have a relationship with YouTube, and they have a separate relationship with YouTube, and sometimes YouTube chooses to pay out the content creator with money that I just paid in. But that's a policy choice, not an obligation. As an advertiser, I don't care what happens to my money as long as my ads run and people see them. They can do whatever they like with the money—pay content creators, pay themselves, burn it, whatever.
• I, a buyer, give PayPal $20. PayPal is obligated to give (most of) that $20 to the person I am buying goods from; the $20 is a liability on their balance sheet. Why? Because I (and a number of other people) would get quite cross with PayPal if they didn't give the money to the person I intended it for. That transmission-of-money-to-intended-recipient is their business model; it's the reason I trusted them with my money in the first place.
A "taxpayer funded" media entity like the BBC is presumably more like a PayPal-style relationship than a YouTube-style relationship: the taxpayers are giving the government money under the assumption that it is obligated to give that money to the BBC; effectively, the BBC is the one the public feels they owe the money to, and the government is just serving a role as the BBC's tax-collector. If the funds were spent somewhere else, people would be very cross with the government.
I don't work in the BBC but it usually works like "you have editorial independence but if you don't say what we want you'll see what happens to your budget"
https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Sum...
I can't really make a convincing case right now, I'll admit, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it feels like a special exemption for (at least) one state-funded entity, for hand-wavy reasons. That seems like in practice it will translate into a policy of banning any PRC equivalent of the BBC, should it ever exist. (Is there currently something close?)
Edit: mjw1007 gives a sense in which the BBC may be more like Chinese state media in this context [1], while derefr gives a more concrete test for deciding which bucket to put the BBC in [2].
E.g. couldn't their t&cs start including "accounts controlled or instruction by a government, political, or commercial entity, or otherwise compensated for posted content, require explicit pre-authorization, and price negotiation. Non-negotiated fees are $ABC per tweet, and $XYZ per account, payable within 30 days". Or some similar terms.
Whether you could make such t&cs work, and whether you can make $GOVERNMENT actually pay is obviously another question: Governments love passing laws that make them immune to law suits domestically, while also providing other countries with immunity.
At least it might be able to resolve those "business intelligence" companies by immediately opening them up to huge costs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20740179
It may end up being relevant to the US elections, but that's unlikely the sole reason.
On the other side: how independant are journalists in a news group when the top boss is a friend of the president and helped him to get elected (true in every democracy)? No need for a direct (and obvious) control to control the press: money is enough
Lastly: it only shows that Twitter is just making rules to target some specific actors (China) without naming it. But, using these rules, Twitter is "weaponizing" informations as much as China.
"Twitter Revolution: How the Arab Spring Was Helped By Social Media" is over 7 years old now: https://www.mic.com/articles/10642/twitter-revolution-how-th...
What’s the alternative though? If it’s not private the only alternative is State control, and I don’t think that the Trump administration or XJP offers less harm than Twitter does right now. If you want the US government to control what Twitter says, that means you trust Trump more than you trust Twitter. That seems like a faustian bargain.
It's the size and number of news organizations that's concerning. Private ownership is fine. But when very few platforms exist, the control of the narrative by any one platform increases.
It doesn't permit a variety of viewpoints.
I mean, would you rather them be solely controlled by the government?
But they could be! The same organizations that Twitter is using to define “state run media organizations” also keep track of US media corporation ownerships and could be tracked against ones that are attempting to slant public discourse via story selection, etc.
Is Fox News considered state media, and if not, will it be?
How will we define state-controlled media in this context? This policy will apply to news media entities that are either financially or editorially controlled by the state. It has been informed by established academic and civil society leaders in this space. Sources include Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, the European Journalism Centre’s Media Landscapes Report, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and UNESCO's framework to assess media development and independence.
I wouldn't be so certain about the Democrats putting up a woman against Trump.
1) A woman would be a prime target for utterly vile sexist campaigning - Trump himself has resorted to that in the past ("blood coming out of her wherever"), and his fan base is orders of magnitude worse. I believe that women will (unfortunately) be voted out in the primaries as voters will want to spare a candidate from this sort of treatment.
2) Centrist Democrats are going for people who voted Trump in '16 but maybe willing to switch (especially frustrated white older men in rural/"flyover" areas) - for that demographic, a "strong man" has it easier to gather support than a woman (or, for that matter, also male candidates with a harsher view on gun regulations, or supporting the right to abortion and LGBT equality).
If I were the Democrat leader, I'd put up a moderate middle-aged white male for the '20 election who (w/c)ould fix the most urgent mess resulting from the current Presidency, and building up a promising left-leaning, progressive woman candidate for 2024.
The banality of evil, etc.