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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Bravo. That whole thread is smart, well-reasoned, and puts democracy above profits. Good for them.

I particularly like his last point:

> 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.

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> Which I cannot read in any way but “f-you, Facebook.”

He was even more explicit:

> 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! ”

I'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'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.

"Political advertising" may be limited to advertising that is bought for by political campaigns and PACs, which they have a previously defined policy for:

https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...

> The policy varies across markets but generally applies to ads that advocate for or against a candidate or political party, or ads by candidates and/or entities registered with their respective electoral commission.

edit: as u/ben509 pointed out, the above link only refers to political campaigns. Here's the link that defines "political content" as both campaigns and issue advocacy (at least in the U.S.)

https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...

This is wrong. He also said issue ads would be blocked.

Perhaps the better link should be this one, which defines "political content", and covers both "political campaigning and issue advocacy advertising"

https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted...

Based on what he said, I don't think any of those will be blocked. It sounds like it's talking about campaign ads specifically, whether that's for people or issues.

I'm sure it will be better defined in the final policy.

Yeah, "political" is a weasel word like "extremist." A view I like isn't political, it's just common sense or settled science, it's the other guy's views that are "political."

That's so nicely put.

Ah, the "I'm always right" argument. Settled science is an oxymoron. For 100s of years people believed things to be totally settled only for the fundamental concept to be proven false. Anyone who starts up with "settled science" is always relying on faulty reasoning.

And common sense. common to whom?

This problem has been addressed in conventional media for a long time, nothing new here.

Well, American conventional media. It will be interesting to see how this policy extends internationally.

It's far easier and less controversial to decide what is and isn't political than to decide what is or isn't true.

Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum - it's really inspiring to see a company take a stand against political advertising, if it can't be properly vetted. One more step to strengthen our democracy.

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.

This is very much the part of the political spectrum I'm on.

Incumbents usually have a lot more money to spend on advertising though too. On average I doubt advertising helps challengers more than incumbents (there are always edge cases of course).

It comes down to incrementality. Sure Trump has way more money than most challengers, but most people have also already made up their minds about him. His cost to acquire incremental voters is probably much higher than a lesser-known challenger.

Even if he’s not getting incremental votes he can dominate the share of voice by pricing out the competitors.

This is what I'm thinking. Like an advertising carpet bomb that drowns out dissent and sows confusion.

As someone who lived through Meg Whitmans's carpet bombing when trying to win the California governorship over Jerry Brown, it's hard to believe that would matter.

For me, it just made me annoyed at Whitman.

A quick googling gave this¹ doc, that says MW spent $178.5M against $36.7M from JB. Brown won easily.

¹ https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...

I would expect that to require an extremely huge amount of money and be impractical.

Candidates + parties + PACs + lobbying + think tanks + advocacy organizations spent $10B in 2018 in the US, whereas the US almond industry made $12B in 2018. So I expect political spending to not be able to change ad prices very much compared to commercial ad spending.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

Yeah I very much doubt Trump is wasting his money bidding on impressions for people likely to support Democrats (assuming he can accurately mimic the dems’ targeting) just to slightly raise the cost of Democratic campaigns

The research shows - contrary to common wisdom - that money only helps a campaign until it's reached all reachable voters with their message. After that, more spending does not matter.

It's true that (A) the candidate with the most money (B) usually wins, but that doesn't mean A causes B. It's more likely that the most popular candidate attracts both the most money and the most votes, simply by being more popular.

Money can create popularity.

I have a hard time buying into that contrarian view in a post-Cambridge Analytica world. If anything, it feels like whataboutism to me. While Twitter is trying to deal with the mass corruption of democracy around the world from micro-targeted lies, they want to talk about some kid's high school student president campaign.

I, likewise, feel it's a massive red herring

>puts democracy above profits

In fairness Twitter has been public since 2013 and in that time only turned a profit in 1 year.

These ads wouldn't make or break them, and its far more valuable to get the PR while FB is in the media for the same issue.

> 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'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.

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

> 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't factor into the decision.

> Only one country has the first amendment

Do you think other countries don't have freedom of speech or freedom of the press?

I wonder about this point. The universal declaration of human rights even mentions this in article 19, but few countries seem to actually uphold that value.

Indeed. https://rsf.org/en/ranking

No other country I am aware of considers paid political ads or donations to political parties 'free speech'.

I am not an American, and to me this comes across as either absurdity or corruption.

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?

Already against the TOS, and they already do that.

yet they seem pervasive still.

>It’s certainly not what the first amendment is about.

>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.

> 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.

Years ago I ran across a quote that went something like "Freedom of Speech gives you the right to own a printing press, not the right to use mine." I wish I could track down who said it.

That's basically what Jack is saying too. I don't see how "Freedom of the Press" could be construed to mean that publishers are obligated to run any ad that somebody is willing to pay for. That's never been the case.

You're absolutely right. There's a fine and subtle distinction to be made here - Freedom of the Press preserve the right of someone to seek to pay for reach for their expression and the right of those with reach to sell it.

As you say, this does not oblige anyone with a press to use it for any given person's benefit.

It just means that the basic concept of paying for expression and to expose other people to it is something baked into the First Amendment. Just not the Speech Clause.

I just found the perfect way to sum this all up and I'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.

Given that practically for any issue of importance there's enough money on each side of the issue to buy a campaign on Twitter, it doesn't really matter. But if Twitter doesn't want to take money that would expose them to pressure over banning somebody'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'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.

Speaking of 'Paying for reach'. 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... https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/us/politics/supreme-court...

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.

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

TikTok also bans political advertising.

Are there any other companies?

> 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

Let's just keep in mind that Trump spent way less on the election in total than Clinton did.

Why do we keep that in mind?

Controversy is addictive. By forbidding spending money to get reach, the ones with most reach will be those who are the most controversial.

Certainly with how media organizations are currently oriented and the assumption that those organizations will continue to be able to advertise or opine on candidates. But there is no definite reason that news network needs to be chasing stories 24/7 as they are now, that's a relatively new trend.

Sounds fine to me. You hold a popularity contest for the top job, the most popular person gets elected in a transparent fashion. It's very different than opaquely targeting individuals because you know what is going on and if you disagree you can do your own thing to win support.

Twitter'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't have an objection to Twitter not accepting political advertising, their rationalization sounds like they're saying voters are too stupid to figure out what to believe so it's best if they are put in a bubble. It'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?

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