Political Ads: Social Media’s Suicide Pill
Twitter did the right thing. Facebook should pay attention for their own good.
I’ve criticized Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey plenty, but this week he made a tough call and did the right thing, banning political ads from Twitter at least for now. It’s both the ethical choice and savvy P&M (positioning and messaging, if you don’t live in marketing meetings) for Twitter’s long-term success.
Free speech is indeed a cornerstone of American society and its politics. On the other side of the world, social media early on proved that bringing open talk among people in restrictive countries was a powerful antidote to oppressive rule.
But while I still believe in free speech, paid political advertising on social media is just that — advertising. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all major social networks treat advertising posts differently than the free content that their members create. For most posts, social’s complicated, carefully refined algorithms deliver to each member the content to which they’re most likely to respond with a measurable action — a Like, a comment, a repost.
Ads on social get special treatment
Advertising posts instead skip past AI filters to get directly in front of viewers who match a specific location, gender, age, race, wealth, political leaning or special interest. Even if none of your friends Like the ad, you’ll see it. And if they do respond to it, we’ve all learned that social media algorithms prioritize “high engagement” content that has made others angry or afraid. The result is a feedback loop that amplifies the worst messages, which are often the biggest lies.
That’s why intelligent, nonpartisan proponents of free speech have deemed social media “a self-reinforcing disinformation dystopia” or outright “doomsday machines.” It’s bad enough that you only see what your friends think you should. If someone can pay to force-feed your peer group a lie, it’s a dishonest campaigner’s dream tech. It’s a despot’s proven call to genocide. Google’s early slogan, “Don’t be evil,” proved naive in a world where everyone thinks they’re the good guy.
No solution today
Jack (no one calls him Dorsey) tweeted at length about the decision. He’s well aware of studies that found blocking political messages favors incumbents, but he’s not convinced that what applies to traditional media will hold true on social. Moreover, just as it took decades to evolve the rules we have in the U.S. and other countries about political ads on TV and radio, he’s right that “the internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day.”
Without a reliable means of regulation, Twitter execs had three options for political ads:
- Try to implement their own rules and controls, a path doomed to missteps and mistakes.
- Ban all political ads until they feel there’s a viable way to manage them.
- Do nothing. Let political advertisers say what they want and let it go as free speech.
Choosing the second option must have taken many meetings, since it means turning away a fair amount of ad revenue and being accused of censorship. But in perspective, it’s not that much money. Most media channels would do worse to lose the Apple account.
Tone-deaf Facebook will sink itself
Facebook instead chose Option 3: Run the ads. I said I was done following the company’s every move, but they keep pulling me back in. You need to see Mark Zuckerberg’s tongue-tied responses when AOC hits him with specific examples of how unrestrained political ads could be used to tamper with the 2020 vote.
The company’s carefully-worded statements about free speech and transparency ignore the platform’s reach to billions, and its amplification of lies over boring truths trying to compete. And I can’t ignore Zuck’s claim to Congress that he created Facebook in the wake of the war in Iraq, when everyone knows he first built it as a Hot or Not for college co-eds. Mark, what does it say that even Breitbart called you on that one.
Jack’s firm decision was the ethical choice, but it’s also good for Twitter’s long-term viability. We in tech marketing and PR remember Yahoo’s inability to hear what its own customers were saying with their clicks. The company went from early online megabrand, the first Internet “destination” site, the Facebook of its day, to a forgotten $10 billion backwater of Verizon.
For a company that prides itself on measuring and knowing what people think and what they want, Facebook management seems to lack a dashboard display that measures backlash. Everyday customers’ fatigue with Zuckerberg’s actions and words, all of them backed by his board and executive staff, already supplies late-night comedy and Onion parody writers with new material almost every week.
There’s plenty for SNL to joke about Twitter, too, but the ad ban brought cheers from many of the company’s usual critics, me included. Zuckerberg, board member Peter Thiel, and everyone else who confuses free speech with manipulative lies should pay attention. If Facebook becomes the channel of choice for tampering with the next U.S. election, Zuckerberg’s post Wednesday that 2020 “is going to be a very tough year” will be the first time he’s definitely told the truth.
