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SALT LAKE CITY — Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Wednesday that his service will no longer accept political advertisements, drawing a sharp contrast with rival Facebook and stirring discussion about free speech, money in politics and tech companies’ responsibility to their users.
University of Utah assistant professor of communication Shannon McGregor spoke to Jeff Caplan on Wednesday afternoon to offer her take on the decision and the current relationship between tech and politics.
McGregor said Twitter’s decision will have little impact on its bottom line, as only a small percentage of its advertising revenue came from political ads and campaigns devote most of their ad dollars to Facebook.
“Twitter is a huge part of campaign strategy, but not as much on the advertising side,” McGregor said.
“The bulk of social media advertising is certainly going to Facebook, so I don’t see it necessarily having a huge financial impact on Twitter, but it’s certainly a bold PR move on their end.”
McGregor called Twitter’s move a “rather extreme and simplistic decision” with a potential for “broad unintended consequences.”
“It’s not going to, for example, hurt Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump,” McGregor said. “But it does limit the voice of challengers in smaller races.”
She said digital advertising can be crucial for largely unknown candidates, and that Twitter’s decision will disproportionately affect them.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has made headlines recently for saying that his company will not fact-check or remove any advertisements from political candidates, casting his decision as a defense of free speech.
McGregor, acknowledging she “may not have a popular opinion” on the subject, said she doesn’t “want Facebook in charge of deciding what is truthful and what is not.”
She said the contrasting examples of Twitter and Facebook “provide more and more evidence that digital political ads are something that is in dire need of government regulation, not regulation from private social media companies.”
McGregor is the co-author of a recent paper about political advertising on social media platforms that focuses on Facebook and Google.
