Be Careful What You Wish For: Twitter Temporarily Bans 'Get Out The Vote' Ads To Comply With 'Fake News' Law

Be Careful What You Wish For: Twitter Temporarily Bans 'Get Out The Vote' Ads To Comply With 'Fake News' Law

5 years ago
Anonymous $syBn1NGQOq

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190409/11262641961/be-careful-what-you-wish-twitter-temporarily-bans-get-out-vote-ads-to-comply-with-fake-news-law.shtml

If there's one consistent theme that we've talked about on Techdirt over the past few decades, it's that attempts to regulate the internet based on a specifically observed "harm" almost always leads to bad outcomes. That's because trying to regulate away a harm frequently fails to take into account context and the specifics of how such laws would be interpreted. For example, over the last few years, there's been plenty of concern about fake news and questionable "political advertising" that is really just, let's say, "propaganda" from parties wishing to mess up the democratic process, rather than actually encourage effective democracy. Because of this we've seen attempts to pass "fake news" laws and "online political ads" laws that clearly come from a place of good intentions (mostly), but the actual impact can be far reaching and lead to unintended consequences.

For example, just last week people suddenly realized that, with the EU Parliamentary elections coming up next month, and France's new anti-fake news political advertisements law, that Twitter would be blocking the French government's own "get out the vote" advertising campaign: