Twitter on Wednesday (Oct. 30) announced a major step towards eliminating the spread of misinformation as we inch closer to the 2020 elections, revealing that the social media platform will no longer accept political ads beginning this November.
“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,” CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted. “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.”
The move puts added pressure on Facebook, which has been the subject of scrutiny and controversy recently over its decision to allow political campaign ads to contain misinformation. Dorsey seemed to address that controversy — though he refrained from specifically calling out Facebook.
“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!’” he tweeted.
“This isn’t about free expression,” he said. “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.”
Twitter will publish its full policy regarding political ads — including, presumably, what exactly constitutes a political ad — on Nov. 15, and the ban will go into effect Nov. 22.
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