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Jack Dorsey has quite the sense of timing. Just minutes before Facebook was set to announce its latest set of financial results the Twitter chief executive suddenly grabbed all the headlines by announcing that his company will no longer accept political advertising. Political reach, he said, should be earned and not bought.
And that decision has refocused attention on Facebook's stance of accepting any political advert even if it contains manifest falsehoods. That stance has got Mark Zuckerberg into trouble, especially among Democrats, who are worried that Donald Trump is going to flood Facebook with false claims in his adverts in the run up to 2020.
But, just as interesting as Twitter's move was the political reaction it garnered. Bill Russo, the deputy communications director for Joe Biden, gave the move a cautious welcome, saying that he was heartened that, for once, revenue had not won out over political integrity. But Brad Parscale, the Trump 2020 campaign director, attacked Twitter for what it had done, calling the move, in typical Trump campaign speak, very dumb.
So why such different reactions given that both parties will be affected by this? Well, in part, I think it's a reflection of a feeling here in Washington that the Republicans have got the upper hand over the Democrats when it comes to digital campaigning. A lot of Democrats I talked to are concerned that the Trump campaign built up reams of voter data over the last election, and has been cannier about using it ever since.
Now, each week, I want to try and answer a question posed by one of our readers or viewers. This week, a lot of people were interested in the Pentagon's decision to hand a $10bn cloud computing contract to Microsoft rather than Amazon. And, in the comments to my piece on this, Ron Ohio asked, is it really a good idea to make the security of the US dependent on a single overall cloud-based farmed out service?
Well, Ron, it's a very good question, and one a lot of people here, both in politics and the industry, are asking. The Pentagon, for what it's worth, says that after this contract is up and running, it does intend to move to a so-called multi-cloud vendor model.
But in the last few days, people I've been speaking to think that Amazon is about to hit the government with such a welter of legal complaints, the DoD might just change its mind altogether and decide to give this contract to more than one company.
Thanks very much, Ron, for the question. And if you have a question you'd like to ask, please enter it in the comments below.
