How Will Muwado Handle Political Ads?

Muwado wants to pay its users that are uploading content to the platform. But Muwado needs revenue to do this. Online platforms mainly make revenue from advertising. You get advertising revenue if the traffic is high. Traffic comes from quality interesting content. But you also need to get noticed. The internet has so much content competing for peoples attention.

Muwado believes in the quality of the content so it decides to boost each post that’s uploaded to the platform thanks to small contributions from our fundraising campaign. Spend money to make money. Economics 101. Pay Facebook to steal some of its users and traffic. Sweet irony. But, some of the content on Muwado that we are trying to promote is of a political nature.

Facebook has been under scrutiny from the US congress about how they handle paid political campaigns on its platform. This is thanks to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that is partly credited for Trump being in office. When I watched that AOC lady shooting nonstop questions at Zuckerberg, all I could think of is I pity her boyfriend when she’s mad at him. Well, not all, I also thought about how we would handle this as Muwado when we get to that bridge.

Seems Facebook is taking steps though. They flagged this fire ‘Dear Maama‘ post by Karamagi Andrew. I can’t boost it till they verify my identity. Apparently, they outsourced the fact-checking to some external press organisations and this is them in action. Twitter, on the other hand, decided to straight out ban all political advertisements. Who is right? The twitter approach makes work significantly easier by eliminating the source of the ethical problem, though they extended the net to posts about ‘critical issues’. It would also make sense for an understaffed and decidedly lean platform like ours. I guess we’ll be benchmarking their approach on this. But first, we need to get advertisers interested. Soon come.

Eh, so many technicalities to worry about when running a social network. Still, it’s nice to witness and learn from all these major growing pains from the more established big boys