“Those viral Tweets you’ve seen? Chances are I’ve made some of them.”
That was an admission from an acquaintance who works in online distribution helping new products find customers.
That was also part of the reason I pondered Twitter’s decision to disallow political ads on their social media platform — a decision widely applauded yet one that seems ripe to generate its own unintended consequences.
Here’s the full text of Twitter CEO Dorsey’s explanation.
“We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…
“A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
“While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.
“Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.
“These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.
“For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well…they can say whatever they want!
“We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we’re stopping these too.
“We’re well aware we‘re a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.
“In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.
“We’ll share the final policy by 11/15, including a few exceptions (ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed, for instance). We’ll start enforcing our new policy on 11/22 to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change goes into effect.
“A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.”
In my articles on this site I’m always interested to understand the first-order expectations (“we do A to get B”) and the less discussed second-order effects (“we do A to get B, but unexpectedly C happens”).
So let’s look at this top-down decision by Twitter and what unintended consequences it might have.
Let’s start with who gets hurt the most and who is helped the most?
Hurt
- Twitter competitors like Facebook. By leading and framing the discussion, Twitter forces its competitors either to defend their position and possibly lose public support or follow Twitter’s lead. This is more public opinion support than financial support since political ads are generally a small part of platform revenue (under 1%).
- Candidates with small followings. Non-incumbents. Niche legislative issues.
- Candidates who are not “good” at Twitter.
Helped
- Twitter in public opinion.
- Incumbents who have already built a following after their election. Dorsey’s quote does reference this possibility.
- Celebrities who have large followings and pet political beliefs. Also those celebrities who will run for office in the future.
- Those who can run non-political audience building ad campaigns.
- Candidates who are “good” at Twitter — often those who are shocking, divisive, and super active on platform.
I get Twitter’s decision, but worry how the impact will cascade.
The interesting difference related to earning reach “when people decide to follow an account” (without data to show this definitively) is that people who disagree vehemently with better known political candidates also often follow them. My observation here is from a unscientific scan of accounts that criticize Trump while also following him. That is, they willingly give Trump their attention, even if they express their strong dislike. Twitter would be able to generate the actual data but I also assume that their decision would be the same regardless of what the data showed.
I agree that the sophistication of political ads, and for that matter, product ads, which have evolved much faster than the psyche of the social media consumer. When an individual reading social media posts goes up against a team of engineers, designers, data scientists, and marketers, all of who get many shots on goal in an effort to convert to a vote or a sale, I put my money on the team rather than the individual.
That “machine learning-based optimization of messaging” can be emulated more roughly with fake “viral” Tweets. Micro-targeting not as much, but that could change.
But I am not yet sure what commitment this sentence means: “Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings.”
Scaling the message
Back to my acquaintance’s comment from the start of the article.
This person works as a “growth hacker” — that is, someone who understands online distribution so thoroughly that he and his team can gain customer signups, purchases, and awareness for client products in creative ways that work within a product’s economics. Seemingly natural virality was achievable, he showed one of my university classes.
Well-run Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ad campaigns factor into his toolkit. But the real weapon of growth was his ability to make something go viral, seemingly naturally. Here’s how it works, in general.
- Marketers script the desired message. Not salesy, not professionally written. Natural sounding.
- An account, often solely used for distribution (not otherwise active) Tweets the message. Apparently very few people actually check whether an account seems real (I asked). One example I saw was an account with under 50 followers and that had tweeted only five times. And yet it had tweets with over 10,000 retweets.
- A network of insiders shares the message to their followers by liking and retweeting the content. Enough of their followers also like and retweet that Twitter’s algorithm shares the tweet more broadly. People buy the new product which they have “naturally” learned about.
- The insiders — not Twitter — receive compensation for spreading the message.
Since Twitter made their announcement, the campaign distribution wheels have already turned. Expect campaigns to hire organic audience building experts as opposed to experts in online ad campaigns. Expect to see — but after the fact — examples like the created viral Tweets from above.
We’ll check back in on this topic during and after the upcoming presidential campaign as we learn how things turned out.
Consider
- When you have iterative, funded, expert distribution teams vs individuals, bet on the teams.
- Top-down decisions bring risks. Top-down decisions with high stakes and advance warning just shift activities elsewhere.
- The best ads are the ones that you don’t realize are ads, just as the best covert operations remain unknown.