Twitter Inc. is banning political advertising in an effort to deal with the spread of false and misleading information on its platform.
The company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, made the announcement, stating that the company had realized that “paying for reach” on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms had a major impact on civic discourse.
We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. 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,” he added.
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
Jack Dorsey – aljazeera.com
Implementation of the new policy will start on November 22 and some exceptions (like ads supporting voter registration) will be permitted.
