Free Republic

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently announced that the social media platform will no longer run political advertisements of any kind. Twitter is a private company and is free to adopt whatever policies it wants, but this decision is not the win for civil discourse and our “democratic infrastructure” that Dorsey claims it is. Defending his decision, Dorsey drew a Manichean dichotomy between meritoriously “earned” media and misleading paid content. That dichotomy is shallow and misleading. While he is right that, absent paid political advertising, “a political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet,” Dorsey does...