Twitter bans all political advertising
- Thursday, October 31st, 2019
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Twitter has made the decision to put a stop to all political advertising, as announced by the company’s chief executive officer and co-founder Jack Dorsey.
“We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” said Dorsey in a tweet.
“A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimised and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.”
According to Twitter, the move to ban all political ads is not a financial one and has not seen it adjust its guidance for the fourth quarter.
“As context, we’ve disclosed that political ad spend for the 2018 US midterms was <$3m,” Twitter chief financial officer Ned Segal tweeted.
Social media companies have been under a lot of pressure to do more about political advertising and how it’s being used to spread false messages. The stance taken by Twitter is entirely opposite Facebook’s approach to the issue, which has been strongly defended by Mark Zuckerberg.
It comes in the same month that popular short-form video app TikTok decided that it would not allow any form of paid political advertising.