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With a belief that reach for political messages should be earned not bought, Twitter has decided to stop political advertising globally.
In a thread, Twitter's CEO, Jack Dorsey announced that the platform is stopping all political advertising on a global level. "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," he wrote.
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 has raised the issue of how political advertising presents an entirely new challenge to civic discourse because of machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. "All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale," Jack says.
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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.
— jack (@jack) October 30, 2019
The final policy around the topic would be shared by the media giant by November 11 and would include certain reasonable exceptions like voter registration awareness. The policy would be enforced from November 22.
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.
— jack (@jack) October 30, 2019
In an attempt to define the ads that would come under scanner after this move, Vijaya Gadde, Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead at Twitter wrote, "Ads that refer to an election of a candidate or ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance like climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security and taxes."
we are working through the details now and we will provide more details on the final definition and a few well defined exceptions (like voter registration efforts) on 11/15. we're getting many helpful questions/suggestions since @jack's thread!
— Vijaya Gadde (@vijaya) October 30, 2019
Currently, the team is reading through suggestions that are pouring in online to understand the ecosystem better before announcing the whole policy on a global scale.