Twitter is banning all political ads globally, starting November 22nd, according to tweets by the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday.
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.
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
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said: “Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising.”
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.
Earlier this summer, 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.
In a statement Dorsey said: “This isn’t about free expression. 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.”
