In the last decade, both Facebook and Twitter have become ubiquitous across the internet. That hasn’t been without controversy, including reports of Russian intelligence using Facebook to manipulate elections and Twitter being criticized for its policies on hate speech and harassment. But in recent months, the two companies have begun to take diverging paths — bolstered by a series of combative remarks between Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
At Forbes, Michael Nuñez explored the emerging conflict between the two tech CEOs. The most recent example of this: Dorsey’s announcement that Twitter won’t run political ads at all, a sharp contrast to Facebook’s contentious policy of allowing political ads and not verifying whether the claims they make are true.
“Dorsey’s comments took aim at how Zuckerberg has defended Facebook’s political ads policy, which allows politicians and political candidates to make false claims in advertisements,” Nuñez writes. “Zuckerberg has positioned Facebook as an American-values-based company that champions free speech by allowing anyone to publish any of their thoughts, as long as they don’t threaten physical harm.”
Nuñez notes that both Dorsey and Zuckerberg have been openly critical of one another and the social networks they operate. Earlier this year, for instance, Zuckerberg was heard on leaked audio critiquing Twitter’s issues monitoring user safety.
That said, Facebook’s record here is also far from perfect — something bolstered by the news earlier this week that Cognizant, a company who had monitored posts on Facebook for illicit activity, was ending its content management work. With the next Presidential election only a year away, it seems like that this conflict won’t go away any time soon.
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