PJMedia

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked if the companies were addressing "micro targeting to discourage voting," what he called "one of the most powerful tools in the propaganda arsenal" that has "certainly been used in the past with the Russians to discourage minority Americans from voting."

"So what are you doing to prohibit this micro targeting?" Wyden said. "I mean, what about ads that share false information about the date of the election or the location of a polling place or ads that tell people they can vote with a text message from their phone."

We've read about what "the Russians" did with their Facebook ads. It wasn't this. This is just Dem Senator Ron Wyden saying something to rile up his minority constituencies.

To be sure, there are jokes about that sort of thing all the time. They are obviously jokes and are not microtargeted to anyone, unless "anyone in earshot" counts as microtargeting.

But that is not what the Russians did, and what the Russians did did not change the outcome of the election, because it was absurdly ineffectual.

PJMedia (quoting Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey)

"We didn't have enough communication going out in terms of what was seen and what was tweeted, and what people are falling in to," the Twitter boss elaborated. "...We need to meet people where they are, and if we determine that people are subject to any falsehoods or any manipulation of any sort, we do need to provide them the full context of that. And this is an area of improvement for us and something that we're going to be diligent to fix."

Well, I fixed the falsehoods in this Congressional hearing for you. Will you please direct everyone to my website so they can get the full context?

More seriously, it seems Twitter (along with the other social media giants) has decided to take a more... editorial stance on the content from its users. That stance invalidates the legal protections associated with being a common carrier type platform.