Twitter doesn’t want political advertisements on it’s platform any longer. This came in as a tweet made by the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey.
“We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” Dorsey said.
The reason for such drastic measure isn’t yet known by anyone but this deliberate action must have been long debated by the Twitter execs and board of investors to see how beneficial this move would be to their organization.
Also there seems to have been a newer policy which the company’s CEO said the company would release on the 15th of November and the enforcement of the policy will commence on the 22nd of November.
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“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,” he wrote. “All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.”
In order to reduce the extreme stress of dealing with political nemesis it constantly lands itself with Political activists and politicians in general, Mr Dorsey said the company “needs to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings.”
With so much users, dealing with the headache and controversies of politics can be a real mess which the company isn’t ready to get itself back into.
Take Facebook as an example, the social network giant is known for it’s refusal to fact-check political advertisements with theCEO, Mark Zuckerberg stating that his company prefers the citizens see and believe for themselves what is true for them and what is not. This move had been openly shunned by Facebook’s employees all objecting the company’s stance about this move.
At the same time, one of the ads that prompted the recent controversy — in which the Trump campaign promoted a conspiracy theory about Joe Biden — also ran on YouTube and Twitter (and on some TV networks, although CNN refused to air it).
The move by Twitter to just cut off political ads altogether except for some extreme cases might make sense as the company probably isn’t ready to be facing backlashes over electoral corruption in the near future just as the 2020 US Presidential election comes nearer.
With the Chinese governments controversially hiding behind politically motivated ads which are meant to suppress the Hong Kong protests, Twitter had declared it would also be blocking state run-media outlets from running ads on it’s platform to avoid the spread of misinformation and propaganda.
Dorsey didn’t mention Facebook by name in his tweets, but he seemed to allude to the company’s position when he wrote, “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! ‘”
Dorsey also acknowledged that Twitter is “a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem,” but he said, “We have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.”
In a statement, eMarketer senior analyst Jasmine Enberg said the move is “in stark contrast to Facebook,” but also noted “it’s likely that political advertising doesn’t make up a critical part of Twitter’s core business.”
