Twitter has announced a ban on political adverts from all its platforms globally beginning next month.
Through the Company Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jack Dorsey,the platform announced that all political advertisements would be banned due to the growing concerns over misinformation effective November 22.
“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
Dorsey however stated that despite internet advertisement being a commercial tool for the company, there are certain risks associated to it that end up affect the lives the different people.
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“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,” read the tweet.
According to Dorsey, political advertising pauses different challenges adding that regulations and transparency need to be enhanced to leveled playing field not only in the present day but also in the days to come.
Twitter’s policies on political advertisement contrasts with those of Facebook as the latter allows for every one to voice their opinions and a ban on political ads would work in favor of incumbents.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that despite the political ads not being the major source of revenues, it is important to allow everyone voice their opinions in their own ways.
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The move by Twitter to ban all political ads did not receive a warm reception by majority of leaders. For instance, Donald Trump, the President of the USA campaign team termed the decision as dumb.
“Twitter just walked away from hundreds of millions of dollars of potential revenue, a very dumb decision for their stockholders,” said Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale.
However, Twitter’s Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal stated that the decision to ban political ads was based on principle and not money.
“Since we are getting questions: This decision was based on principle, not money. As context, we’ve disclosed that political ad spend for the 2018 US midterms was (less than) $3 million (Sh300 million),” said Segal.
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