Hi all, Gerrit De Vynck here. Twitter Inc. is wading deeper into the tricky business of deciding who can and can't advertise on its site. The social media company says it won't let state-controlled news organizations buy ads to spread their propaganda anymore. The decision came just hours after news website the Intercept said an English-language outlet run by the Chinese Communist Party was buying ads to boost stories that attacked critics of the Chinese government. It also dovetailed with news that Twitter had caught the Chinese government using fake accounts to spread false information about pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
But Twitter didn't say which accounts, Chinese or otherwise, would be banned from advertising. Many governments fund news organizations for reasons ranging from pushing propaganda at home and abroad to simply propping up a struggling media industry. Even independent publicly funded outlets like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation can have specific mandates such as supporting local culture. Twitter says the policy is based on work done by press freedom nonprofits like Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House, and it's probably safe to assume the British Broadcasting Corp. or National Public Radio won't be hit with a ban any time soon, but there is still a lot of gray here. Al Jazeera is largely independent except when it comes to covering the Qatari government, which partially funds it. Would that limit its reach under Twitter's new rules? A spokesman for Twitter declined to name which outlets it was planning to cut off.
The policy essentially gives Twitter the space to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. If a particular outlet does something that gets Twitter in trouble, it can quickly decide the rule applies to them. In a way, it formalizes something the company had already started doing. In 2017 it banned two Russian government-backed outlets—Sputnik and RT, formerly known as Russia Today— after U.S. investigators said the organizations were part of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Facebook Inc. and Google's YouTube haven't followed Twitter's lead in this instance, but they could. Twitter is blocked inside China but Chinese businesses still spend money on the media site to advertise their products to global consumers. That could change if the Chinese government wants it to. The episode is just the latest in the trend of social media sites deciding, after serious amounts of foot-dragging, that they need to get more active in policing their platforms. It won't be the last.
—Gerrit De Vynck
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