Thread · 5 tweets · 30 Oct 2019

I very much support Twitter trying to address this problem head on (and who wouldn’t like the shade @jack throws sideways in there) but it’s going to be very interesting to see how they handle the thorny case of outlets paying to promote their own content.

It is quite common for online media to buy ads that don't link to a product (eg. subscription) but instead to an actual article. Content can often be better than any marketing messaging: if people come read your articles and love them, they might subscribe (or see more ads).

But now, some of that content might be political. If it's news coverage, it will very often be, not to mention opinion pieces. At what point are those political in a way that would run afoul of Twitter's rules?

If they're from a trusted news source, you might blanket-accept them all. But defining who is a trusted news source is hard (and some large purveyors are hard to distinguish from state media). If you ban all promotion of articles remotely political, that'll harm media.

However if you accept any news source, then every last PAC out there is going to launch its own online media and just promote political articles. I don't have a silver bullet. Not fucking up at Web scale is hard. I'm very curious to see Twitter's detailed policy and roll out.🔚