Political Ads On Twitter – Free PDF Download

Table of Contents

Context

Leading social media platforms like twitter are considering ban on micro-targeted political ads.

Online political advertisings are messages intended to reach a large audience through periodicals, sample ballots, web sites, e-mails, text messages, social media, and other online or electronic formats enabling the exchange of communication.
Targeting
Invisibility

Micro-targeting has got potentially damaging results in the context of political advertising, particularly for elections.
These platforms make it possible to go from manufacturing consent to manipulating consent.
A person is continuously fed with information to vote for a particular party.

Many social media platforms claims that they are only intermediaries providing space, and that the content is being generated by the people to be consumed by the people, and they have no role to play.
They defend them with the clause that they are not automatically liable for what people are seeing on those platforms.

Background
Political advertising is advertisements used for the purpose of appealing, directly or indirectly, for votes or for financial or other support in any election campaign. It includes usage of media from conventional to social media for this purpose.

First, instead of banning political ads entirely, platforms should not permit “data opacity” for political ads and should have clear enforcement mechanisms for violations of targeting policies.
First, instead of banning political ads entirely, platforms should not permit “data opacity” for political ads and should have clear enforcement mechanisms for violations of targeting policies.
Third, platforms should introduce product solutions that facilitate counter-speech.
Instead of banning political ads they should put their political advertising money where their mouth is, and commit to donating all revenue from political advertising to nonprofits and researchers focused on election integrity.