San Francisco (AFP)
Twitter launched a huge pavement in the pond on Thursday announcing that the social network will no longer accept any political ads anywhere in the world.
"We think the reach of a political message should not be worth buying," tweeted network co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey before a long series of micro-messages detailing his decision.
In particular, he explains that a political message gains in audience thanks to subscriptions to an account or retweets. "Paying for the audience removes that choice and imposes on people optimistic and targeted political messages," says Dorsey, adding, "We believe this decision should not be polluted with money."
This choice contrasts sharply with that of Facebook, the world's leading social network. Mark Zuckerberg recently defended political messages on his network, including whether they contained lies or untruths, in the name of freedom of expression.
Jack Dorsey responds directly to his alter-ego.
"For us, it's not credible to say: + we work hard to prevent people from circumventing the rules of our systems to spread false information but if someone pays us to target and force people to see their advertising politics ... so they can say what they want +! ", he said.
Twitter, like Facebook or Google, derives most of its revenue from advertising, often targeted in an ultra-fine way thanks to the vast data collected each time users use the networks.
- A new challenge -
For @Jack, "political ads represent a whole new challenge to public discourse", and to quote, the artificial intelligence that makes the impact of messages more effective, the micro-targeting that can touch people that it is necessary, false information that is not verified and "deep fakes" (photos or videos rigged hyper-realistic, ed). All more and more quickly, more sophisticated and unmanageable volumes ".
For the man who wrote the first tweet of the story is the credibility of social networks that is at stake.
The stakes are all the greater as social networks have been heavily criticized for not blocking Russian manipulation campaigns in the 2016 US election.
The decision was hailed by Boston University professor Michelle Amazeen, who said, "Until private social networks can prevent political ads from containing false information, it's good thing to do. "
But Jasmine Enberg, an eMarketer analyst, points out the limits of the decision. "Because of the nature of the platform, users, advertisers and politicians will use Twitter to discuss politics, which will not solve the problem of misinformation," she insists.
Mark Zuckerberg had recently exposed his views on political ads during a long speech in Washington.
"In a democracy, I think it's up to people to decide what is credible, not to tech companies," he said, although there are some exceptions to this principle, such as incentives for violence.
For the young billionaire, political ads are useful for small candidates, local candidates, challengers or groups that would otherwise be ignored by the media.
This position is extremely controversial and criticized. The controversy had been fueled by a commercial message from Donald Trump's Facebook presidential campaign, which contained false information about a Democratic rival, Joe Biden, and Facebook's refusal to remove him for this reason.
To demonstrate the absurdity - in his eyes - of Zuckerberg's position, Elizabeth Warren, who for the moment took the lead in polls of Democratic candidates in 2020, had bought an ad on Facebook where she said - - falsely - that the founder of Facebook and the network officially supported the re-election of Donald Trump.
Again, Jack Dorsey responds, "We realize that we are only a small part of a much larger ecosystem, and no one could argue that our actions announced today favor those who are already in power, but we have seen many social movements reach massive size without any political publicity ".
"I am convinced that (this movement) is only going to increase," said Jack Dorsey.
The head of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, Brad Parscale, sees in all this a maneuver to favor the left. "Another attempt to silence the Conservatives, since Twitter knows that President Trump has the most sophisticated online program that has ever existed."
© 2019 AFP