Twitter, a global social network platform, will ban all political advertising, the company’s CEO has announced aimed at curbing false information. “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. 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,” he said.
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
According to Jack Dorsey, the new policy, announced via will come into effect on 22 November and will apply globally to all electioneering ads, as well as ads related to political issues.
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.
— jack (@jack) October 30, 2019
Dorsey calls for “forward-looking political ad regulation”, noting that transparency requirements that have been proposed by US lawmakers 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,” he said.
For instance, 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! 😉”
— jack (@jack) October 30, 2019
