Twitter to ban all political advertising starting in November 2019

Twitter is going to ban all the political advertisements globally, starting November 22nd, according to tweets by Jack Dorsey, CEO Twitter. "We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought," Dorsey tweeted, along with a number of additional tweets explaining the reasons why.

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.

The changes will affect both candidate ads and issue ads, although ads encouraging voter registration will still be allowed, along with other exceptions. Dorsey said a full policy will be made available to the public on November 15th.

“Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents,” Dorsey said. “But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising.” This decision is to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…

The company’s decision comes after weeks of Facebook stumbling over the same issue. Earlier this month, Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign penned letters to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube asking that they refuse to run false or misleading political ads. Biden’s campaign had become the target of a series of ads placed by President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign that made baseless claims regarding the Biden family’s relationship with the Ukrainian government.

In a response to the question, Facebook said that it would not be fact-checking claims made by politicians in ads placed on the platform.

“Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” Katie Harbath, Facebook’s public policy director for global elections, said earlier this month. “Thus, when a politician speaks or makes an ad, we do not send it to third party fact checkers.”

Twitter currently only allows certified campaigns and organisations to run political ads for candidates and issues. The latter tend to advocate on broader issues such as climate change, abortion rights and immigration.

The company said it will make some exceptions, such as allowing ads that encourage voter turnout. It will describe those in a detailed policy it plans to release on November 15. Twitter’s policy will start on November 22.

Twitter has had some policies in place to keep politicians from making false statements on its platform. Twitter said that it would gray out tweets from public figures like Trump that violated its rules and restrict users’ abilities to share them, but hasn’t implemented it on any tweets so far.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told US Congress last week that politicians have the right to free speech on Facebook. “This isn’t about free expression,” Dorsey 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.”

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.