Thursday, October 31

A few hours after Twitter announced a ban on political ads yesterday, my phone lit up with a stream of texts from a senior ad executive. “Twitter ads move is just a smart PR play,” said the executive, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

What followed was a discussion of why Twitter is banning political ads, and why Facebook has not. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll recall the design of tech products often determines what they spit out. Look at the machine, and you’ll understand its outputs. This is another one of those cases.

Twitter optimizes for public posts, the ad exec said. News and newsmakers are at its heart, and Twitter pushes their content out via its algorithm, explore tab, and retweet function. On Twitter, it’s hard to go a day without seeing a tweet from Trump or AOC.

Since politicians already dominate Twitter, they don’t need to advertise. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said as much yesterday, when he tweeted: “We have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.”

My conversation with the advertising exec then turned to Facebook:

While Twitter optimizes for public posts, Facebook optimizes for posts from friends and family, crowding out posts from news organizations and politicians (one reason why Facebook is creating a news tab). In other words, you probably wouldn’t see much content from politicians on the platform without advertising.

Twitter made the right move. And Facebook should follow suit. Political advertising is manipulative as it is. It doesn’t need the massive scale and micro-targeting that allows for the sort of harmful campaigns we saw in 2016.

But it’s more difficult for Facebook to take the plunge. This is why you’re seeing Jack Dorsey gleefully poking at Zuckerberg, while the Facebook CEO seems compelled to go around the country making speeches about freedom of expression to keep his political ad spigot running.

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