Jack Dorsey has quite the sense of timing.
Just minutes before Facebook was set
to announce its latest set of financial results
the Twitter chief executive suddenly
grabbed all the headlines by announcing
that his company will no longer accept political advertising.
Political reach, he said, should be earned and not bought.
And that decision has refocused attention
on Facebook's stance of accepting any political advert
even if it contains manifest falsehoods.
That stance has got Mark Zuckerberg into trouble,
especially among Democrats, who are worried
that Donald Trump is going to flood
Facebook with false claims in his adverts
in the run up to 2020.
But, just as interesting as Twitter's move
was the political reaction it garnered.
Bill Russo, the deputy communications director
for Joe Biden, gave the move a cautious welcome,
saying that he was heartened that, for once, revenue
had not won out over political integrity.
But Brad Parscale, the Trump 2020 campaign director,
attacked Twitter for what it had done,
calling the move, in typical Trump campaign speak,
very dumb.
So why such different reactions given that both parties
will be affected by this?
Well, in part, I think it's a reflection of a feeling
here in Washington that the Republicans have
got the upper hand over the Democrats
when it comes to digital campaigning.
A lot of Democrats I talked to are
concerned that the Trump campaign built up
reams of voter data over the last election,
and has been cannier about using it ever since.
Now, each week, I want to try and answer
a question posed by one of our readers or viewers.
This week, a lot of people were interested in the Pentagon's
decision to hand a $10bn cloud computing contract to Microsoft
rather than Amazon.
And, in the comments to my piece on this, Ron Ohio asked,
is it really a good idea to make the security of the US
dependent on a single overall cloud-based farmed out service?
Well, Ron, it's a very good question, and one a lot
of people here, both in politics and the industry, are asking.
The Pentagon, for what it's worth,
says that after this contract is up and running,
it does intend to move to a so-called multi-cloud vendor
model.
But in the last few days, people I've
been speaking to think that Amazon
is about to hit the government with such
a welter of legal complaints, the DoD
might just change its mind altogether
and decide to give this contract to more than one company.
Thanks very much, Ron, for the question.
And if you have a question you'd like to ask, please enter it
in the comments below.