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Comment by lpolovets | Hacker News Reader

I'm still not sure what I think about the ban, but one potential downside is it will give people with lots of organic reach, like celebrities and incumbents, a big advantage. Before you could use organic reach to combat paid reach and vice versa, but now organic reach is the only thing that counts. For example, if The Rock runs for governor of California next year, it will be very hard for his opponents to compete (at least on Twitter, and on any other platforms that follow this policy).

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Even further, it is well known that Twitter throttles follow counts and shadow bans people They Don't Like™, so Twitter is already artificially promoting some people, and demoting others. And that's before we get into the outright suspensions.

Twitter doesn't have organic speech, period. And now they're justifying why they allow some political ads, but not others.

As much as I'm not a fan of celebrity politicians, the situation you describe sounds pretty democratic.

The other side of the original argument is this: someone like The Rock has a huge advantage, but on the other hand anyone without a following will be at a huge disadvantage. What happens if a celebrity politician tweets a falsehood like "my opponent supports VileIdeaXYZ" and the opponent has 300 Twitter followers and can't pay to promote a tweet?

I don't think a system that favors people based on how much money they have access to is great, but I also don't think a system that elects people based on their fame is great. Having both paid and unpaid options for reach provides a little bit more balance.

Running an outright dirty campaign would break ToS. So even if they were protected from deletion by virtue of being a politician, their tweets would no longer be included in feeds. It'd be political suicide.

Proper enforcement is hard. They won't get there soon. It'll come slowly for a few years to avoid mistakes. When AIs get reliable at detecting lies/harassment, enforcement will become the norm. (my prediction)

One might say this is good as it will increase organic participation in elections and politics.

If that organic component is bad like The Rock running terminator style, that may be very obvious given there isn't an astroturf campaign to keep that bad organic support alive.

Isn't organic reach a little more meritocratic than just throwing money into paid ads?

It is, but I also suspect that more checks and balances would be a good thing in this situation.

The effect of "meritocracy", at least in this context, is not linear. Every incremental unit of influence or fame (followers, impressions, etc) leads to super-linear influence between some interval (probably tapers off at the tail).

And it is not independent / non-zero sum. If "A" gets more influence, it may take from "B"'s opportunity. And if the growth function is indeed super-linear, then B's opportunity is very quickly squashed.

It shifts the burden away from twitter, thats why it s a smart move. In the grand scheme of things it s not really more meritocratic. A bunch of awareness campaigns will no longer be possible, so we won't know if they had merit

I think this should be the top comment, not buried on (currently) page two. The debates about truth in political advertising and Facebook are about something different. Both are valid issues to discuss, but it’s off topic.

What matters when running for an elected office is visibility and recognition. This recognition and unpaid organic reach may have not been what won Trump the US Presidency, but there is little doubt it won him the republican primary.

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