Twitter bans all political ads, and the world waits to see if Facebook will follow suit
Jack Dorsey has announced that Twitter is implementing a ban on all political advertising on its network. The move comes after Facebook said it would not ban political ads, but Dorsey believes that the ability to reach a large audience with political messages "should be earned, not bought".
While the ban is a global one, the impact is likely to be felt most strongly in the US where spending on political campaigning is huge -- and whoever spends the most money has a tendency to fare better. The manager of the Trump 2020 campaign, Brad Parscale, has dismissed Twitter's decision as "yet another attempt by the left to silence Trump and conservatives".
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At the moment, full details of the new policies that Twitter will use to police political advertising have not been revealed. So far, Jack Dorsey has said that "we've made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally", and that the ban will come into force from November 22. Just a week before this, on November 15, full details will be published.
Dorsey made the revelation in a tweet thread last night:
We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…?
— jack ??? (@jack) October 30, 2019
He went on to explain the thinking behind the move:
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.
— jack ??? (@jack) October 30, 2019
These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.
— jack ??? (@jack) October 30, 2019
Dorsey gave some reasons for the blanket ban on political as, explaining why it was not only going to apply to political candidates:
We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we're stopping these too.
— jack ??? (@jack) October 30, 2019
In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.
— jack ??? (@jack) October 30, 2019
We’ll share the final policy by 11/15, including a few exceptions (ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed, for instance). We’ll start enforcing our new policy on 11/22 to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change goes into effect.
— jack ??? (@jack) October 30, 2019
He concluded by stressing that the decision was not a matter of limiting free speech on Twitter:
A final note. 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.
Facebook has been under a great deal of pressure to do more to stop -- or at least limit -- political manipulation on its network, particularly in the run-up to elections. In recent days, Mark Zuckerberg has faced strong criticism for permitting politicians to made demonstrably false claims in ads on Facebook.
The social network giant is yet to publicly react to the announcement from Twitter, and it remains to be seen if it will bow to pressure and follow suit with a similar ban.
Image credit: Sparrowbh / Shutterstock