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Advertising The Media Politics

Spotify Joins Twitter in Suspending Political Ads in 2020 (usatoday.com) 54

Posted by EditorDavid from the sounds-of-music dept.
An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Spotify announced Friday that it will suspend political advertising on its platform next year, making it the latest in a series of tech and social media platforms to publicly address how it will handle content targeting voters. The music streaming company said that its decision was made because it does not yet have the means to screen political advertising content.

"At this point in time, we do not yet have the necessary level of robustness in our processes, systems and tools to responsibly validate and review this content. We will reassess this decision as we continue to evolve our capabilities," a spokesperson said in a statement to media outlets.

The move by Spotify, which was first reported by AdAge, comes after a wave of backlash against Facebook, which said it would not fact check content in political ads... Twitter also committed to stop accepting political ads in a stance against "forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people." And Google has said it will restrict the way political advertisers can target specific audiences.
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Spotify Joins Twitter in Suspending Political Ads in 2020 More

Spotify Joins Twitter in Suspending Political Ads in 2020

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  • Read... the profit gained doesn't yet cover the legal expenses or exposure for facilitating that market.

    No one wants to touch that hot potato.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      More like, hmmm, good back to sleep my good little sheeple, you don't need to see that political messaging, voting is such a bore, leave it to the boring people to worry about that boring stuff, let others DECIDE FUCKING FOR YOU, how you will be shorn and slaughtered, they have your best interests at heart.

      Yeah, those scummy fuckers are banning it for an entirely different reason and just fucking lying about it, as content distributed are prone to do, like fucking 100% of the fucking time.

      Yeah ignore polit

  • Political ads should be illegal... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Saturday December 28, 2019 @12:06PM (#59564760) Homepage Journal

    Many countries highly control political advertising. I like the UK's way. Every politician get the exact same amount of money, paid for by the election fund. Not a penny more than this amount is allowed to be spent. The ads all start on the same day and end exactly six weeks later. It is genius.

    • Re:Political ads should be illegal... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 28, 2019 @12:26PM (#59564790)
      Limiting political ad spending is an unconstitutional violation of the first amendment. The Supreme Court has rules this is the case. The changes you are talking about would require a constitutional amendment.

      • Re:Political ads should be illegal... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Saturday December 28, 2019 @01:02PM (#59564876) Homepage Journal

        Limiting political ad spending is an unconstitutional violation of the first amendment. The Supreme Court has rules this is the case. The changes you are talking about would require a constitutional amendment.

        Yay. Let's do it. The founders made a process for that.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by AHuxley ( 892839 )
          People can add rights... federally.
          If not then every US city and state would try and ban any amendment they wanted every decade.
          The protected right to publish and free speech stays.. in the USA.

          • No, rights exist whether they are explicitly recognized or not, 'adding them' simply extends the list of rights that are explicitly protected by adding them to the enumeration.

      • The Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people and money is speech. What this accomplished was discrediting the electoral system and bringing the Law itself into disrepute. It most certainly did not convince the masses that corporations are people and money is speech - for those are obvious lies.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Agripa ( 139780 )

          The problem is that to rule otherwise would mean that individual rights so not exist collectively. If a single person has a right to free speech, which includes spending money to make copies, buy air time, whatever, then how many people does it take doing the same things collectively to lose that right?

          • Oh get real broham.

            No one is talking about limiting the individual rights of our Owners. They will continue to have the same rights to freedom of speech etc that all the rest of us in theory possess. We just don't believe the Owners should have vastly more rights than all us plebs.

            You know that dammed well. Why are your parroting the half-wit talking points fed us by partisans of the new feudalism? Even the biggest fool can see right through that tired bullshit.

    • Why stop at political ads then? Just make all ads illegal. However, if you get to have free speech, then so do the politicians. Inconvenient for assholes and idiots to have the same rights as you and I, but that's the price we pay for freedom. If there are certain platforms that don't want to accept those types of ads, that's their own business. I'd no more require them to run political ads than I would ads for a fleshlight or some new crytpocurrency pyramid scheme.

      As to the system in the UK, who gets to
    • Probably would work if the media were not all on one side.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      People USA has the freedom to publish, to be the press and to speak about government.
      The USA is not a part of the UK.

  • Call me pessimistic but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Saturday December 28, 2019 @01:14PM (#59564928) Homepage

    ..I suspect the motivations behind this are two fold;

    1) financial. They can't make enough money from political ads to offset the blowback and...

    2) They don't want to be perceived to be supporting trump ( this is more a subset of 1, but large enough to warrant its own bullet point ). Trump undeniably has the advantage going into 2020, and let's be honest with ourselves; all he has to do is play clips of the democrats contradicting themselves or sounding batshit insane to get re elected ( didn't Biden just say he'd flush 100s of thousands of jobs in pursuit of the green new deal? ).

    So I get where they're coming from. The question is, will this position hold when the democrats have the upper hand? I'm skeptical, but I would hope so.

    • Re:Call me pessimistic but... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ZombieCatInABox ( 5665338 ) on Saturday December 28, 2019 @01:45PM (#59565008)

      They don't want to be perceived to be supporting trump

      Nobody with even a tiny shred of human decency wants to be perceived as supporting Trump. Go ahead, trumptards, mod this post to hell, but you know I'm right.

      Let's not kid ourselves: No presidential candidate, from any denomination, is an angel. But Trump is an order of magnitude worse than any of them. Yes, even Hilary Clinton, so don't give me the usual "But But Hilary" bullshit. Trump is pure filth. He's been pure filth basically all his miserable life, not just because he's now president. This is painfully obvious to anyone who's lived anywhere on planet Earth for any lenght of time in the past fourthy or so years.

      I'm willing to bet that even among the Trump supporters, only about 10% actually like the guy. The rest just say they do to troll liberals on Internet forums. But they'll vote for him anyway, because they're whores, and Trump is the candidate on their side. It would be a dog, a monkey, or Adolf Hitler himself, they would vote for him anyway. And I'm not conviced liberals would act any differently.

      But the difference is that liberals have semi-decent presidential candidates right now. And, yes, there are also semi-decent guys on the other side that would also make good candidates for the presidency. How about getting your shit together in the next primaries and giving us decent candidates, instead of singling out the most discusting, filthy, evil pieces of trash the world has ever known (I'm talking to both sides here) next time ?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by OYAHHH ( 322809 )

        Oh puh-lease get over yourself.

      • Here's what folks misunderstand; decent, or even semi-decent people, would make horrible presidents. As amused as I am by Trump ( oh, and I am, and would vote for him for no other reason than the entertainment value ), I'll agree that he's probably a horrible individual. Yet, he has delivered some serious results. The UN members stepping up and contributing their fair share, our troops in less danger than before, and what is possibly the greatest economy our country has ever known.

        All that comes from wha

      • If I could mod this reply I would mod it troll. This isn't a Trump vs. Hillary comment thread. It's about paid political advertising on online platforms. Nobody cares about your opinion of Trump, negative or positive. It's not going to change any minds, or sway any opinions. Nobody should want to be perceived as supporting ANY political candidate because it's a faux pas in a workplace or corporate setting and frankly more people should keep their favorite political candidates to themselves. Regardless of pa
        • Or perhaps that is the motivation behind the whole thing which is what the comment suggested. I guess you think all people act in good faith (meaning Spotify) despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (not meaning Spotify but the media in general.) So the comment is on point or probably on point which is what discussion is all about. I guess you need to get off Slashdot if you don't like reading peoples opinions.

      • Orange man BAAAAAAAAD!!!1!!

      • Project much?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Agripa ( 139780 )

        Nobody with even a tiny shred of human decency wants to be perceived as supporting Trump. Go ahead, trumptards, mod this post to hell, but you know I'm right.

        Let's not kid ourselves: No presidential candidate, from any denomination, is an angel. But Trump is an order of magnitude worse than any of them. Yes, even Hilary Clinton, so don't give me the usual "But But Hilary" bullshit. Trump is pure filth. He's been pure filth basically all his miserable life, not just because he's now president. This is painfully obvious to anyone who's lived anywhere on planet Earth for any lenght of time in the past fourthy or so years.

        So anybody who did not support Hillary is a Trump supporter? You just made the same mistake which Hillary did to lose the election. Please continue denigrating those who disagree with you and did not do what you want to gain their support.

        Let's get down to something we disagree on; I know Hillary is worse. Go read the FBI report about Vince Foster's death if you can find it online anymore and then get back to me. Pay special attention to the interviews.

    • There needs to be a class in school where you are screamed at by a drill sergeant that a company placing an ad is purely an exchange of money for exposure and awareness, and not an endorsement. Traumatize this simple fact into people.

  • Translation (Score:3)

    by ChrisMaple ( 607946 ) on Saturday December 28, 2019 @01:28PM (#59564970)
    Those ads promoting abolishing prisons and disbanding the army? They aren't political, so they're O.K..
    Those ads promoting reducing regulations on businesses and lowering government expenditures? They're political, so we're rejecting them.
  • Sure Spotify is suspending political ads but they still run things like "Your daily drive" which features highly curated media outlets like The Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, and left-wing podcasts. All they're saying is that they won't run blatant political ads, but if you are are "journalist" reporting on "facts" they will continue to spam people with this super divisive content.

  • isn't advertising (Score:3)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Saturday December 28, 2019 @06:13PM (#59565636)
    It wasn't / isn't the advertising that's the real problem. It's the thousands of fake users posting thousands of false information from troll factories that's the problem. As far as advertising, the US has reached such a polarized point that facts no longer matter especially for the GOP. If a member of of the GOP tribe says it, no matter how egregious or down right wrong they are, the minions buy it. Global warming, Russian influence in the 2016 election, and even science - fact seekers and law enforcement are all part of "deep state conspiracies" when a complete lie can be proven wrong and dismissed out of hand. The Reichwing zombicons are so blind, that FauxNoise has been declared a threat to national security. https://www.wired.com/story/fo... [wired.com]
    • Project much? Russians GOP trolls, glowbull warming add a few more talking points and you are there.
  • A lot of people will be happy that Spotify have made this move to restrict political marketing and advertising [flycastmedia.co.uk] from the platform, and with the issues and backlash Facebook has faced in recent times, it's probably the smartest decision for the company.

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