Twitter to stop accepting all political ads on the platform globally

[spanone]

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Wednesday in a series of tweets that the tech giant will no longer accept political advertising of any kind on its platform.

Why it matters: Tech companies have come under fire as of late for policies around how they police political ads. Facebook, most notably, has been criticized for saying that the company would not fact-check ads from political candidates or politicians.

Details: According to Dorsey, more specifics about the policy will be published by Twitter on Nov. 15. The policy will go into effect on Nov. 22.

Between the lines: In his tweets, Dorsey said that the reasoning for the policy change is in part because Twitter acknowledges that a tech platform's unique ability to distribute ads in a highly targeted manner, and with easily tested and customizable messaging, is different than the advertising opportunity on broadcast TV — where networks are required by law to run ads from all political candidates, regardless of whether they lie in those ads.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1002

[BigmanPigman]

1. Will Fuckerberg do the same?

Nope...too greedy and sick with power.

[mr_lebowski]

2. WOW! That is ... pretty amazing. They're giving up a ton of dough ...

At first blush I have to say I support it, but could be swayed otherwise with more info, potentially.

Facebook doing the same would be much more important, however.

[blogslut]

3. It's a good move but Twitter will still have a nazi problem

I'm glad Jack's doing this and maybe it will force Zuckerberg to follow suit. It's not going to kill disinfo, hate and lies but it's something.

[efhmc]

7. I have found that the resisters are pretty good at exposing this

behavior. But I also noticed quite a few responses to this announcement asking what Twitter is doing about Nazis and bots.

[blogslut]

9. Sadly

Just from a quick scan of my feed, I think David Corn tweeted/retweeted something about the amount of money political campaigns spend on Twitter and that it's far less than they spend on FB and Google.

In my perfect democracy, all Media would grant free ad space for any political campaign. Take the money out of it completely.

I get that there's money to be made with political advertising but, come on. Brands have way more money than even the biggest political campaign.

Also, f*ck PACs and the Citizens United decision.

[demmiblue]

4. K&R

[demmiblue]

5. Thread:

Link to tweet

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…🧵

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.

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.

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.

These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.

For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! 😉”

We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we're stopping these too.

We’re well aware we‘re a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.

In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.

We’ll share the final policy by 11/15, including a few exceptions (ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed, for instance). We’ll start enforcing our new policy on 11/22 to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change goes into effect.

A final note. 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. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1189634360472829952.html

[spanone]

6. Thanks!

[demmiblue]

8. De nada!