| Hi, everyone. It's Shira. Facebook Inc. is a superpower. Twitter Inc. is a relative nobody. On Wednesday, though, Twitter won a round. Just as Mark Zuckerberg's company reported quarterly earnings, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey tweeted that his company would stop accepting advertisements from candidates for elected office. Starting next month, Twitter also won't accept payments to promote tweets or other ads that take a position on meaty policy issues such as immigration, health care, national security and climate change. Dorsey did not mention Facebook, but he was clearly taking a stand against Zuckerberg. Facebook and its CEO have been under fire for not fact-checking posts from politicians, including their ads. As the controversy flared, Zuckerberg has repeatedly said Facebook doesn't want to censor political speech. Dorsey, essentially, said that Facebook's free-speech argument was bogus. "This isn't about free expression. This is about paying for reach," he tweeted. Twitter deserves credit for recognizing that the stakes are high from precisely targeted digital messages related to politics and policy, and those messages shouldn't remain unchecked. Some of Facebook's employees have similar views. Dorsey's policy shift was also astute, and not much of a business sacrifice. Compared to Facebook, political candidate advertising on Twitter is small. The company said last week that political ads represented less than $3 million in revenue during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Zuckerberg said Wednesday that ads from politicians might comprise 0.5% of Facebook's revenue next year. That suggests candidate ads of around $400 million. The timing of Dorsey's announcement also was a direct jab at Facebook on its earnings day, and it seemed to catch the bigger company off guard. In Zuckerberg's prepared remarks on Facebook's earnings call, he gave another impassioned defense of the company's policy not to screen political ads. Zuckerberg either didn't know about Twitter's ad-policy shift, or he chose not to mention it. (Oh, and Facebook reported Wednesday a healthy quarter of growth in both revenue and users.) Zuckerberg's message was that Facebook policy position might be wrong, but it was a carefully considered, principled stand rather than one motivated by a desire to make money from potentially inflammatory messages or a way to keep conservative politicians from criticizing the company for censorship. Because of the company's ad policies, Zuckerberg said, "I expect that this is going to be a very tough year." He's probably right. Before we all pat Twitter on the back too hard, the company has much work to do. It's not trivial to draw the line on what qualifies as an "issue" ad. Would a MeToo group be considered ineligible for paid tweets, for example? Twitter can also make all the policies it wants, but without effective enforcement Dorsey's tweets are empty words. And as we learned from the 2016 U.S. presidential election and other campaigns since, harmful misinformation about hot-button issues and bogus messages about candidates are not confined to paid messages. Much of the internet misinformation related to the 2016 U.S. election were posts, pictures and video that people liked, clicked on, and otherwise chose to spread without Facebook getting paid to promote it. It's clear now that misinformation online is an ongoing, pernicious problem that won't be fixed by one policy made by one company. And Dorsey won't have the last word on the issue of how to treat political messages online. But for one day, he and Twitter showed up their more powerful neighbor. --Shira Ovide | 
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