Twitter Is Banning Political Ads From Everyone — Candidates And Regular People Alike

By Lauren Rearick


Starting November 22, you could notice fewer political posts on your Twitter timeline — or, at the very least, fewer political posts folks are paying for.


On Wednesday (October 30), Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey mentioned via tweet thread that Twitter would no longer accept political advertisements. According to him, agency assists the idea of earning political reach, as instead of buying it.


“A political message earns reach any time people determine to follow an account or retweet,” he wrote. “Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing rather optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.”


The change is set to affect political ads from anyone and each person, not only those from candidates — which means that surrogates or activist groups also run the risk of being impacted. It’s not nevertheless clear on how thorough this line is, or what constitutes a political ad, though Dorsey stipulated that ads encouraging voter registration would still be allowed. MTV News has reached out to Twitter for comment, and Twitter’s complete policy on political ad regulation is scheduled to be released on November 15.


He contended that the decision wasn’t about free speech: “This is about paying for reach. And paying to improve the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure might not directly be ready to nickname. It’s worth stepping back categorize in attempt to address.” While Dorsey also admitted that such a block could hinder candidates trying to primary incumbents, he also warned against the more and more digitized world that some people have weaponized sort in attempt to spread disinformation — in particular, “machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unobserved misleading statistics, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.”


“These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads,” he warned ominously. The changes to Twitter’s ad system, then, is ostensibly an effort by the agency to stem the misinformation problem before it gets worse.


While Dorsey did address the necessity of regulating social media ads in his statement, he also acknowledged that it’s difficult to carry out. “Ad transparency requirements are progress, however not enough,” he mentioned. “The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to make sure a level playing field.”


Twitter’s newly reported policy stands in stark contrast to Facebook’s handling of its political ads — in short, that the agency is infamously loose any time it comes to the vetting of such posts. President Donald Trump ran an ad containing misinformation about former Vice President Joe Biden, and Senator Elizabeth Warren used Facebook’s own system against it once she ran a campaign with purposefully misleading elements on the platform to prove the point. Furthermore, as soon as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently grilled Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on the possibility of using his website to run fake ads, he dodged the question. Initially, he mentioned that he didn’t know whether that was possible, and then he clarified, “I think lying is bad, and I think in the event you were to run an ad that had a lie in it, that could be bad.”


Just hours immediately after Twitter’s announcement, Zuckerberg told investors throughout Facebook’s quarterly earnings call that his social media platform will continue to publish political ads, The Hill reported.


“Although I've thought whether we should not carry [political] ads in the past, and I’ll continue to do so, on balance for now I've thought we should continue,” Zuckerberg mentioned. “Ads can be a critical piece of voice — even for candidates and advocacy groups the media might not directly otherwise cover so they can get their message into debates.”


Twitter’s announcement earned praise from some, however others pointed out that the site has a long history in inaction any time it comes to hate speech on its platform. However in spite of the fact that the social media platform has banned some right-wing conspiracy theorists in the past, The Huffington Post has tracked a continued white nationalist presence on Twitter.


Dorsey has also defended the decision not to deactivate Trump’s Twitter, despite repeated instances in which the President seemingly violated the company’s terms of service.” Blocking a global leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets, would hide critical statistics people should have the ability to be able to see and debate,” the organization wrote in a blog post.