(Headline USA) Social media has become the target of a dueling attack ad campaign being waged online by the sitting president and his election rival.
President Donald Trump has bought hundreds of messages on Facebook to warn Americans that its competitor, Twitter, is stifling his voice and influence in the November election.
Democratic challenger Joe Biden has spent thousands of dollars advertising on Facebook with a message of his own: In dozens of ads on the platform, he’s asked supporters to sign a petition calling on Facebook to remove inaccurate statements, specifically those from Trump.
The major social media companies are navigating a political minefield as they try to support their preferred political candidates without displaying too-obvious anti-conversative bias.
Their new actions — or in some cases, lack of action — have triggered explosive, partisan responses, ending their glory days as self-described neutral platforms.
Even as the two presidential campaigns dump millions of dollars every week into Facebook and Google ads that boost their exposure, both are also using online ads to criticize the tech platforms for their policies.
Trump says that Twitter and Snapchat are interfering in this year’s election.
“Twitter is interfering in the 2020 Election by attempting to SILENCE your President,” said one of nearly 600 ads Trump’s campaign placed on Facebook.
Biden has sent multiple letters to Facebook and attacked the company for policies that allow politicians, Trump specifically, to freely spread his message on its site.
Biden is paying Facebook handsomely to show ads that accuse Facebook of posing a “threat” to democracy.
It’s “a huge departure from 2016,” said Emerson Brooking, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a Washington think-tank. “If you were leading the Trump or Clinton campaign, you weren’t writing letters to Facebook all day long. It wasn’t so much a central campaign issue. Now it seems like it very much is.”
Since the last presidential election, Facebook and Twitter have banned voting-related misinformation and vowed to identify and shut down inauthentic networks of accounts run by domestic or foreign troublemakers.
Before this year’s election, Twitter banned political ads altogether, a decision a company spokesman told the AP it stands behind.
And Facebook, along with Google, began disclosing campaign ad spending while banning non-Americans from buying U.S. political ads.
Facebook didn’t comment for this story.
But calls to deflate Big Tech’s ballooning power have only grown louder from both Democrats and Republicans, even though the two parties are targeting different companies for different reasons to rally supporters.
Those politics will no doubt be on full display Wednesday, when four big tech CEOs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook, testify to a House Judiciary Committee panel as part of a congressional investigation into the tech industry’s dominance.
Biden has focused on Facebook, with a #MoveFastFixIt campaign that admonishes Facebook for not doing enough to censor Trump.
His campaign just last month spent nearly $10,000 to run ads scolding the company on its own platform.
“We could lie to you, but we won’t,” says one of Biden’s ads. “Donald Trump and his Republican allies, on the other hand, spend MILLIONS on Facebook ads like this one that spread dangerous misinformation about everything from how to vote to the legitimacy of our democratic process.”
Despite criticizing Facebook, Biden’s campaign said it’s still purchasing millions of dollars in Facebook ads because it’s one of the few ways to counter Trump’s posts — since Facebook won’t censor him in all cases.
Twitter became a Trump campaign target after the company rolled out its first fact check of his tweet about voting in late May.
Twitter has since applied similar labels to five other Trump tweets, including two that called mail-in ballots “fraudulent” and predicted that “mail boxes will be robbed” if voting doesn’t take place in person.
Trump responded by signing a major executive order challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides protections from lawsuits for internet companies that have served as a bedrock for unfettered speech online.
“It’s preposterous that Silicon Valley, the bastion of diversity and liberalism, is terrified of intellectual diversity and conservative voices,” Trump deputy national press secretary Ken Farnaso said in a statement.
Republican leaders have since joined in railing against Twitter.
This month, Rep. Jim Jordan, a conservative Republican from Ohio, demanded Twitter hand over a full accounting, including emails, of how it decided to fact check the president.
Saying “big tech is out of control,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz joined dozens of conservative media outlets, Trump staffers and politicians who waged a two-day campaign last month urging their Twitter followers to ditch the platform and join Parler, a social media app that does not censor its users.
Facebook could be next for a face-off with the president and his allies now that the company has vowed to label any posts — Trump’s included — that violate its rules against voting misinformation or hate speech. Facebook has yet to take such action, though.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.
