According to a tweet by the company’s Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey on Wednesday, Twitter is going to ban all political advertisements globally with effect from November 22nd, 2019.
Twitter will Ban all Political advertising Starting in November
Dorsey tweeted, “We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.”
He further added, “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.”
Reportedly, the changes will affect both candidate ads and issue ads, although ads encouraging voter registration will still be allowed, along with other exceptions. Dorsey said that a full policy will be made available to the public on November 15th.
He also said, “Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach a massive scale without any political advertising.”
Meanwhile, Twitter’s chief financial officer, Ned Segal, also tweeted on Wednesday that the company made less than $3 million from political ads in the 2018 cycle. He said, “This decision was based on principle, not money.”
The announcement comes amid intense scrutiny of Silicon Valley’s handling of political ads. Social media companies, particularly Facebook, have been criticized for allowing politicians to run false ads.
However, Dorsey’s comments put him at odds with the senior Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Zuckerberg reiterated his stance on political advertising on Wednesday, highlighting how Facebook and Twitter have diverged.
Without directly addressing Dorsey’s announcement, Zuckerberg opened Facebook’s third-quarter earnings call by saying “we need to be careful about adopting more and more rules” surrounding political speech.
He further added, “In a democracy, I don’t think it’s right for private companies to censor politicians or the news. FB will “continue” to evaluate whether it is beneficial to allow political ads on Facebook, but that so far he has concluded that permitting political advertising is the better choice.”
Earlier this summer, Twitter said that it would gray out tweets from public figures like Trump that violated its rules and restrict users’ abilities to share them but hasn’t implemented it on any tweets so far.
Dorsey said, “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.”
