Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg had a sharp and very public exchange with Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin last week after Twitter announced it would ban all political advertising on its site.
The battle over political advertising on social networks first erupted as the heads of Facebook and Twitter clashed on whether to allow the ads on their sites. Both sites are under growing pressure to stop carrying ads that spread false information that could steer elections.
Here is what happened:
TWITTER TAKES A STAND
Twitter announced it would ban political advertising on its platform, the company's chief executive said last Wednesday (Oct 30).
"We've made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally," said CEO Jack Dorsey in a statement. "We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought."
"Paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today's democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle," Mr Dorsey said in a tweet from his personal account.
The decision drew a swift response from President Donald Trump's campaign, which said in a statement posted to Twitter that the ban was a "very dumb decision".
FACEBOOK WON'T BACK DOWN
Rival Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened his earnings conference call last Wednesday by defending the company's policy to run ads from politicians containing false or misleading claims, saying that Facebook did not want to stifle political speech.
"In a democracy, I don't think it's right for private companies to censor politicians, or the news," Mr Zuckerberg said on the call.
HOLLYWOOD JUMPS IN
The Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin then fired a shot at Mr Zuckerberg.
In an op-ed for the New York Times last Thursday, Mr Sorkin said Mr Zuckerberg was "assaulting truth" by claiming Facebook's political ads are protected by free speech, and therefore do not require fact-checking.
The Washington Post reported that Mr Sorkin's editorial was one of Hollywood's first attacks on Facebook's political ad policy.
ZUCKERBERG DIGS IN
Mr Zuckerberg then fired back at Mr Sorkin using a monologue on his Facebook page.
"You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest," Mr Zuckerberg posted, quoting one of Mr Sorkin's own movies.
FACEBOOK'S CONTROVERSIES
Facebook has a 10-year track record of incidents showing inadequate measures to protect users' data privacy, most notably in 2018 when The Guardian reported that 87 million Facebook profiles were harvested by Cambridge Analytica in a bid to influence voters in the 2016 US election.
The Trump campaign spent US$44 million (S$60 million) on Facebook advertisements between June and November 2016, according to Bloomberg.
Last week, Facebook announced steps to combat misinformation and voter suppression ahead of the November 2020 US presidential election. On the same day, it disclosed the removal of a network of Russian accounts targeting US voters on Instagram.
The social media giant has come under fire in recent weeks over its policy of exempting ads run by politicians from fact-checking, drawing ire from Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.
