Twitter no longer wants to distribute advertising with political content.
With a view to the 2020 presidential election in the USA, the social media company Twitter is facing increasing pressure not to spread advertising with possible false information. The company's co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, personally announced this in several tweets:
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
From November 22nd, paid political advertising will no longer appear in users' timelines. This means that Twitter is going in the exact opposite direction to Facebook, where political advertising is not only allowed, but is also not checked for truth by official fact checkers.
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The complete message from Jack Dorsey:
We have made the decision to discontinue all political advertising on Twitter worldwide. We believe that the reach of political messages should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons...
A political message deserves reach when people decide to follow or return to an account. Paying for reach eliminates this choice and forces people toward highly optimized and targeted political messages. We believe this decision should not be jeopardized by money.
While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, this power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to sway votes that affect the lives of millions of people.
Internet political ads pose entirely new challenges to civil discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unverified misleading information and deep fakes. All with increasing speed, sophistication and overwhelming size.
These challenges will impact all internet communications, not just political ads. It's best to focus our efforts on the core problems, without the additional burden and complexity that money brings. Trying to fix both means doing nothing well and damages our credibility.
For example, it's not credible for us to say, "We work hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading information, but when someone pays us to target them and coerce people , to see their political ad…. well… you can say whatever you want!”
We considered just stopping candidate ads, but ads are a way around this. Furthermore, it's not fair for anyone but candidates to buy ads on issues they want to advance. So we stop those too.
We recognize that we are a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some may argue that our actions today could favor the incumbents. But we have seen many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I hope this will only grow.
In addition, we need future-oriented political advertising regulation (very difficult). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not sufficient. The Internet offers entirely new opportunities and regulators need to think beyond today to ensure a level playing field.
We will have the final policy by November 15th. share, including some exceptions (for example, ads supporting voter registration are still allowed). We will be on November 22nd. begin enforcing our new policy to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change takes effect.
One final note. This is not about freedom of expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant implications that today's democratic infrastructure may not be prepared for. It's worth taking a step back to deal with this.
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