Senators Have Mixed Reactions to Twitter’s Political Ad Ban

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “is right” and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey “is wrong,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told reporters. Banning all political ads benefits political incumbents and mainstream media, he said: “If Twitter’s new proposed speech ban is followed throughout social media, it will make it nearly impossible for challengers to defeat incumbent politicians.” He commended Facebook for “defending free speech.” Zuckerberg recently testified the platform doesn’t fact-check political ads (see 1910230063).

As a company, Twitter's free to make such decisions, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told reporters. That doesn’t mean every company should ban political ads, he said: But every platform should remove false material. He noted websites like YouTube are able to quickly remove copyright infringing content. Some ads are “so objectionable” they shouldn’t run, he said, urging Facebook to draw the line.

Twitter's “trying to make a principled decision,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told reporters. “If Facebook believes what they’re saying, aren’t just caving into the alt-right, they’ll say we’re going to have the same standards across the board.”

Twitter made an unwise decision, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., told us: “It went way overboard.” The Trump campaign Wednesday called it a “very dumb decision” for Twitter to walk away from potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Like Cruz, the campaign suggested the decision will benefit liberal media outlets: “This is yet another attempt to silence conservatives, since Twitter knows President Trump has the most sophisticated online program ever known.” A Twitter spokesperson cited Dorsey’s announcement in response. Facebook didn’t comment Friday.

Cruz said neither Fox News nor “Silicon Valley billionaires” should be able to control public discourse. “For social media to be in the business of banning and censoring political speech or silencing candidates for office, citizen groups and individual citizens is profoundly harmful to our democratic process,” he said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said businesses are free to follow Twitter’s example. “That’s a business decision. They don’t have to run political ads,” he told reporters. “I don’t think there’s a law that you’ve got to run a political ad.” He argued that whatever laws apply to TV and radio ads should apply to social media, though he noted that might come with technical difficulties: “I don’t know how you do that.”

Twitter was “fulfilling its responsibility” to avoid becoming a “cesspool of falsehood and disorder,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told us. Hopefully, Facebook and Google will follow, he said, noting Facebook would obviously suffer more financially than Twitter. If Facebook doesn’t show respect for “their public trust, a lot more will be hurt than their bottom line, and it will essentially fuel the push for stronger regulation,” he said. Twitter’s decision was generally a “step in the right direction,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., noting Facebook and Twitter have different economic models. Facebook, Warner said, needs to address blatantly false ad material with the same restraint as cable TV.

Twitter’s decision is a distraction from the bigger issue: that Silicon Valley has centralized control over information flow, which naturally raises speech concerns, said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. Platforms are trying to get around the fact they’re “monopoly-sized” companies that depend on “vacuuming” large amounts of data, he said.

Platforms should either ban all political ads or allow everything to run, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told reporters. Political opposition ads on TV already contain false and misleading information, he noted. He guaranteed if the decision “really hurts their bottom lines badly, the ads will be back.”