Dec 4, 2019
It was a rainy Thursday afternoon when Matt received a text from Daniel Kreiss, telling him to keep an eye on the news that day. A few minutes later, Twitter announced that they would be banning all political ads in the 2020 election. They immediately agreed that Twitter’s decision was the wrong one: political advertising has its downsides, but there are a lot of benefits too. A blanket ban gets rid of the bad stuff, but it gets rid of the good stuff too. Together, Matt and Daniel wrote an op-ed for the NYT proposing four possible solutions that Twitter could’ve implemented instead of banning political ads altogether. We invited Daniel to the podcast to further discuss these solutions.
Daniel Kreiss is an associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and Director of the PhD in Media and Communication. His research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice.
- NYT Op-Ed: Four Ways to Fix Social Media’s Political Ads Problem – Without Banning Them
- Link to Jack Dorsey’s Tweets on the policy
Music by Velvet Negroni