Twitter lobbying on feds’ internet ad policy

Twitter Inc. has registered to lobby the federal government on its internet advertising policy, following the social media company’s ban on political ads on its platform globally. The registration, effective November 1, seeks to specifically address "the adoption of digital media and advertising by government." The new subject came two days after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the company would not allow political advertising on the platform by blocking accounts from paying to promote messages. “A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet,” Dorsey said on Twitter. “Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be comprised by money.” When reached for comment about whether the new registration is related to the ad ban and what it is about generally, Twitter’s Canadian operations said they would not comment further. Late last year, the government passed Bill C-76, also known as the Election Modernization Act, that required large social media companies to track and make public a registry of political ads ahead of the federal election. While Facebook Inc. pledged to commit to that goal, Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. said they would not allow political ads on their platform in the country. It was only afterward, in June, that Twitter announced it would also ban political ads in the country ahead of the fall contest. One reason for not allowing those ads -- that it was a technically-challenging feat for the amount of time that they had available -- didn’t strike some Parliamentarians as an acceptable answer. Earlier this year and leading up to the election, Microsoft and Twitter began ramping up lobbying activity at the federal level. Two months before it banned political ads in Canada, Twitter registered to educate federal officials on social media use during elections. Twitter’s first registration to lobby the federal government, in the summer of last year, was about Bill C-76, which was unveiled a couple of months prior. The law completely banned foreign third-party money from being used in Canada’s elections and proposed to hold social media companies accountable for knowingly allowing that kind of advertising. It was not made clear, however, how that would’ve been enforced. At the time, Twitter’s head of government and public policy in Canada, Michele Austin, said part of the reason for its first registration was to inform government officials about how the company’s online advertising works -- a “self-serve” model that would’ve made it difficult for the company to enforce, for example, the location of the account. Austin told The Wire Report that the company wanted the government to “understand that responsibility rests on the advertisers to prove the location of their bank account.” During the election campaign, the Green Party released a platform that pledged to ensure that social media companies would only allow actual people, with verifiable identities, to publish on the platform. The promise, which was panned by experts, would have been one answer to a concern that bots were wreaking havoc on elections by amplifying misinformation and disinformation, following Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal that rocked the tech giant for much of last year.

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Twitter lobbying on feds’ internet ad policy

Brief | November 18, 2019

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