Twitter’s co-Founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, has announced the social media giant is banning political advertising on its platform globally. The final policy is expected November 14 and which will include a few exceptions such as ads in support of voter registration; enforcement will begin November 22.
“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,” Dorsey stated.
In a series of posts, Dorsey attributed the company’s decision to its perception of political message reach as something that should be earned and not bought.
He said: “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 noted that internet advertising is incredibly powerful and this power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.
“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. 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,” Dorsey added.
Twitter initially considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads presented a way to circumvent. Additionally, Twitter considered it to be unfair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So the company also decided to stop issue ads also.
He called for 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,” Twitter CEO said.
