Politics and Social Media: Who’s Accountable?

A “disinformation-for-profit machine” is Elizabeth Warren’s description of Facebook. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff said the social network “needs to be held accountable for propaganda on its platform.” Privacy regulators around the world don’t know whether to break Facebook up or clip its power. Politics and social media are inevitably intertwined. Who’s accountable? Apparently no one.

Germany has outlawed Facebook’s ad business. In Europe, the region’s top court ruled that individual countries could order the company to take down posts–not only in their own countries, but elsewhere. Several of Facebook’s partners on a cryptocurrency initiative dropped out after regulators complained. The age discrimination lawsuits, Congressional appearances and data breaches keep piling up. 

Zuckerberg remains unfazed by the responsibilities of his role 

Mark Zuckerberg insists that Facebook was founded on the premise of creating community, of giving people a voice. If this was his mission, he has more than fulfilled it. Social media has given us a platform for sharing every miniscule aspect of our lives. Zuckerberg made this a free speech issue, calling up civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King. “I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.” He assured us that this was not about economics: Political ads are a negligible line item in Facebook’s $55.8 billion annual revenue.

In case you missed it, Facebook’s sweeping new policy states that they will not moderate politicians’ speech or fact-check their political ads because comments by political leaders, even if false, were newsworthy. 

Remember that Facebook played a role in the 2016 election

Let’s not forget that Facebook played an important role in the outcome of the 2016 election. Cambridge Analytica, driven by Russian hackers and God only knows who else used Facebook to deploy an aggressive campaign to derail the Clinton campaign. Given the toxic outcome of the effort, you’d think Facebook would be falling all over itself to make sure they remained clear of political associations in 2020. 

Twitter has apparently taken the high road

Twitter’s position is that they will not be posting any political ads. 

• Foreign nationals are prohibited from targeting political advertisements to the U.S.
• Political campaigning advertisers are prohibited from using foreign payment methods.

Not so fast . . . 

The policy may sound simple, but it involves judgments that expose the company’s politics. Twitter has apparently decided that climate change is a political issue, so get this–they will be banning ads about science. Apparently they will be remaining open to taking money from big oil to promote their climate-polluting brands. 

And it’s pretty hard to get past the fact that our country’s President uses Twitter as his primary communication channel. He uses it to hire and fire people and set policy. He’s now averaging 36 tweets/day and that number likely will escalate as the campaign season heats up. We have every reason to expect that he will continue to use Twitter. All of this leaves me a little skeptical of Twitter’s apolitical policy. While they may not be posting ads, their platform, like Facebook’s, will be influenced by politics.

As the year draws to an end, it’s time to think about new marketing efforts

New websites, new initiatives, new campaigns to reach new audiences. Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and internet marketing specialists. 

A Lot to Love in BERT, Google’s New Algorithm Change

Say hello to BERT, Google’s new algorithm change. It’s based on context, and this time, it’s something we may like. I Google everything, so I’m looking forward to this. 

Here’s how Google’s algorithm change is going to work

Currently, Google’s algorithm treats a search string as a bag of words. Google picks out what it considers to be the important words from that string and delivers the results to you on a search engine results page (SERP). In this question, “Who is a great keynote speaker?” “keynote” and “speaker” are more important than “is” and “a.” But eliminating “is” eliminates context. In this sentence, it’s irrelevant. 

Examples of how the algorithm change affects search results 

• “Parking on a hill with no curb.” The old algorithm discarded “no,” in its search and delivered results that referenced how to park on a hill with curbs. The new algorithm recognizes that  “no” plays a critical role in the meaning of this search and delivers results showing how to park uphill or downhill with no curb.
• “2019 Brazil traveler to USA need a visa.” In the past, Google ignored “to” and returned results on U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. But “to” clearly matters, and Google picks up the difference, returning results for Brazilian travelers to the U.S.

BERT is short for “bidirectional encoder representations from transformers.” It uses artificial intelligence and a motherload of a dataset to deliver better contextual results. More simply, it better understands what you’re actually looking for when you enter a search query.

BERT: The most positive change in five years

Google cautions us to keep in mind that only some search queries will be affected by the algorithm changes. Determining how the algorithm works is still something of a mystery, even to rockstar SEO pros. According to Pandu Nayak, Google VP of research, “This is the single biggest … most positive change we’ve had in the last five years and perhaps one of the biggest since the beginning.”

You should be watching your website closely for any changes to your search rankings and spend some time analyzing keyword context, especially if you try to rank well for longer-tail keyword strings. If your search traffic remains stable but conversion rates dip, that’s a sign at least portion of the traffic isn’t interested in what you provide.

Keep creating good content and providing value

Finally, if you give up and decide that it’s impossible to truly optimize for BERT, keep creating content for people, not search engines. Keep it crisp and clear. Use short sentences that a fifth-grader can understand. Be smart. Be funny. Provide information that helps people do their jobs.

Kudos to Google

BERT is a step in their effort to understand what people want when they search. The more you deliver what people want, the more likely you are to rank high in search results. And really, isn’t that what we all want? 

Planning a new website or marketing efforts for 2020? 

Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and digital marketing experts.