Twitter now tightened its policies and rules for political advertisements

Twitter

Twitter now tightened its policies and rules for political advertisements. Political ads set to be prohibited on Twitter soon, CEO Jack Dorsey says on Wednesday. Now the company is banning political ads from its platform.


Twitter is very clear about this. Actually, that political ads including manipulated videos in the viral spread of misleading information presented challenges to civic discourse quote all at an increasing velocity sophistication and overwhelming scale.


Previously, Twitter has long allowed political ads. But, on Wednesday, Twitter's chief executive Jack Dorsey said the social media giant would ban them starting in late November.


Dorsey said,

"Political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse at increasing velocity, sophistication and overwhelming scale. The ads have significant ramifications that today's democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle."

Dorsey said that he thinks the reach of political messages should be - what he calls - earned, not bought. Therefore they will not be allowed no politician's ads, no issue based ads. So, it's a pretty wide ban on Twitter.


Internet advertising is an incredibly powerful and very effective tool for commercial advertisers. The power brings significant risk to politics where it can be used to influence votes that affect the lives of millions.


If politicians put up posts that are misleading, they're going to count on voters to look at those posts, those ads and say, OK, that's something that's not true, allow the public to make those decisions about truthfulness or not, not do the fact-tracking on the front end.


Twitter is helping to implement, helping to perpetuate your falsehoods. They're not going to play that role. The new policy will go into effect on November 22nd.


Facebook has received criticism of course in the past several weeks over its policy to neither fact-check nor remove political ads placed by politicians.


Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly defended allowing paid political ads, including those with false claims, amid scrutiny of Facebook and other tech platforms.


Zuckerberg said,

"In a democracy, I don't think it's right for private companies to censor politicians or the news."

Jack Dorsey kind of hinted at this last week during an interview where he said he didn't necessarily agree with the stance that Mark Zuckerberg had been taking.


There's been this great deal of controversy around Facebook in recent weeks over their policy of not pulling down misleading posts that politicians put up.


It might apply some extra pressure to Facebook because now all of a sudden you have one of their chief rivals when it comes to not only advertising but just kind of these. These free speech debates coming out and taking a very different stance.


All of a sudden people might say well hey if Twitter is willing to do this or if it's going to work on Twitter, why can't it work on Facebook.


It's gonna be interesting to see what happens when elected officials and candidates are tweeting out their advertisements as well on their own pages.





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