Twitter bans political advertising
"Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse," CEO Jack Dorsey declares in 'sub-tweet' aimed at Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has announced a global ban on paid political advertising on the platform.
Dorsey explained the decision in a series of tweets.
"We've made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought," he began.
He continued: "A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.
"While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.
"Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale."
Instead, therefore, politicians and political parties will need to coordinate activity by their supporters on Twitter in order to influence voters, rather than directly targeting groups of voters according to various criteria.
Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse
He continued: "It‘s not credible for us to say: "We're working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want!".
Twitter will also be blocking ‘issue ads' - adverts purchased by special-interest groups in a bid to influence voters towards or against particular candidates.
He concluded: "This isn't about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today's democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It's worth stepping back in order to address."
The ban is largely aimed at the high-spending near-free-for-all of the US presidential elections in 2020, with the Democratic primaries already underway, rather than the UK.
Dorsey promised that a ‘final policy' document would be released on 15th November, with the policy enforced from 22nd November.
The ban has also been interpreted as a ‘sub-tweet' aimed at Facebook, which has resolutely refused to ban political advertising. Online campaigning, including political advertising, was pioneered by President Obama's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has defended the company's policy of running adverts from politicians that may contain false or misleading claims, saying that to do otherwise would stifle political speech and could see the company take sides.