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Twitter's Decision To Ban Political Ads Is A Moderation Choice Itself That Likely Will Backfire In Its Own Way

Twitter's Decision To Ban Political Ads Is A Moderation Choice Itself That Likely Will Backfire In Its Own Way

4 years ago
Anonymous $xdcOWPpsb_

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191102/01232743312/twitters-decision-to-ban-political-ads-is-moderation-choice-itself-that-likely-will-backfire-own-way.shtml

Last week we wrote about Twitter's decision to ban all political ads, most likely in response to watching all the shit being flung at Facebook for its decision to not fact check political ads. We focused on the fact that the "costs" of content moderation can sometimes be so high as to make any related revenue just not worth it. However, in that post we did mention that no matter what, there would be criticism of this decision and follow-on decisions concerning what is, and what is not, a "political" advertisement.

There have been a bunch of good, thoughtful articles about all of this that seem worth highlighting. First up is a piece from Markena Kelly at the Verge, who pointed out that Facebook has already tried to ban political ads, but just in the state of Washington, in response to local laws. And just as we predicted will happen with Twitter, there have been ongoing disputes over what constitutes a political ad: