Jack Dorsey's announcement that Twitter will cut out political ads increases the pressure on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg to follow suit
FB has had problems here. Everything involving an important topic gets defined as a “political ad” https://twitter.com/... Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : (This will be a rerun of all those people doing research on Facebook who were upset to discover that ‘Facebook clamping down on collecting data’ meant that *they* couldn't collect data. 'It was only supposed to apply to other people!') Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : Is Twitter going to disclose the ad revenue it's giving up by not taking political ads? It would be good to get an actual number on how big the financial incentives here are. See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The position reversal is the story's spine: back in 2017, when Facebook was the one moving on transparency around political ad buys, Twitter publicly said it had nothing to announce. Two years later Dorsey has moved first, and the pressure inverts onto Zuckerberg, who used his earnings call to hold the line rather than follow.
First-order effects
- Zuckerberg is now defending Facebook's decision to keep running politician ads on the record, estimating they will be under 0.5% of 2020 revenue — a number that frames compliance as cheap and makes Twitter's sacrifice look small unless it is quantified.
- Political advertisers face a split market: candidate and policy ads have a home on Facebook but not Twitter, shifting 2020 spend toward whichever platform keeps accepting them.
Second-order effects
- Benedict Evans' challenge that Twitter disclose the ad revenue it is giving up would, if answered, give every platform a benchmark for what refusing political money actually costs — turning a values debate into a pricing one.
- The definition fight Evans flags ('everything involving an important topic gets defined as a political ad') forces Twitter into carve-outs; reporting already suggests it will keep issue-awareness ads like climate change while banning candidate and policy mentions, which moves the boundary dispute rather than ending it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, paid political speech becomes a differentiator between platforms rather than an industry norm — with Facebook absorbing the reputational load (and the scrutiny of tools researchers say were weakened just as 2020 spending ramps up) while rivals buy credibility by exiting.
- Regulators and advertisers gain a live A/B test: two large platforms with opposite policies heading into the same election cycle, making the cost of each approach measurable for the first time.
The trend: Social platforms are splitting into divergent regimes on paid political speech, with exit-as-credibility (Twitter) competing against scale-plus-defense (Facebook) as the two viable postures.