It’s sometimes hard to know who’s really behind decisions at big tech firms. It could have been the PR team (‘we don’t want more negative press’), the policy team (‘the luddites in parliament want to regulate us’) or the engineers (‘we can’t stop it’). Whoever it was, a couple of weeks back both Google and Facebook announced measures to prevent foreign interference in tomorrow’s Irish referendum on the eighth amendment, which effectively outlaws abortion. Facebook is only allowing organisations based in Ireland to run ads about the subject; Google’s gone one further and banned them all.
I suspect it was a rare instance of everyone agreeing. After relentless stories about Cambridge Analytica and Russia meddling, the tech firms – especially Facebook – promised action. They said they’d restrict political ad purchasing and hire more people to manually review content.
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