Doubt Anyone Who’s Confident That Facebook Should Ban Political Ads
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced Wednesday that the social-media platform he runs will no longer allow political advertising. The company has reached the judgment that “political message reach should be earned,” as when people decide to follow or retweet a politician, rather than “bought,” as with targeted political ads. Commercial ads are fine, he argued. But political ads, which “can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions,” present new challenges to civic discourse, including “machine learning–based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.”
It isn’t clear that political advertising affects the lives of millions any more profoundly than commercial advertising for
