Twitter Bans All Political Advertising Worldwide Ahead of 2020 Election

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
Oct. 30, 2019

This is going to help entrenched establishment candidates who already have a large reach and hurt up and coming grassroots candidates who do not.

From CNBC:

Twitter is axing political ads from its site, CEO Jack Dorsey announced Wednesday.

Twitter’s stock dropped more than 2% in after hours trading following the announcement.

The move sets Twitter in stark contrast to Facebook, which has received criticism from lawmakers and its own employees in recent weeks over its policy to neither fact check nor remove political ads placed by politicians. Facebook has argued it should not be the one to make decisions about its users’ speech and that politician’s speech is newsworthy. Earlier this month, Chinese video app TikTok became the first major social media platform to ban political ads from its platform.

Here's Dorsey's announcement:

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

While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.
— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

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.
— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we're stopping these too.
— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

In addition, we need 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.
— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

A final note. 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.
— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

Establishment politicos have already paid for their reach.

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