From November 15, Twitter will ban any political advertising

Twitter head Jack Dorsey announced that in November this year, any political advertising will be banned on the platform, despite the fact that it brings good money to the company.

The changes will affect both candidate ads and issue ads, although ads encouraging voter registration will still be allowed, along with other exceptions.

«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…», — writes Jack Dorsey.

In a long thread, Dorsey detailed his company’s position. According to him, political statements get great coverage from the audience when people decide to subscribe to specific accounts and decide to repost tweets.

However, if such coverage can simply be bought, the audience no longer solves anything, and optimized and targeted political messages are forcibly shown to people. Nevertheless, Twitter believes that such decisions should not be compromised by money.

“Although online advertising is an incredibly powerful and extremely effective tool for commercial advertisers when it comes to politics, this power carries significant risks and can be used to influence the voices and lives of millions of people”, — writes Jack Dorsey.

The founder of Twitter reports that the new version of the revised platform rules will be presented on November 15, 2019, and these changes will take effect on November 22 of this year.

Earlier this month, the 2020 Joe Biden presidential campaign wrote letters to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube asking them to stop displaying false or misleading political ads.

Biden’s campaign was the target of a series of advertisements posted during President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, which contained unfounded statements about the Biden family’s relationship with the Ukrainian government.

Read also: Twitter accidentally shared users’ data with advertising partners

However, this summer it was announced on Twitter that he would hide tweets from public figures such as Trump, who violate his rules and limit the ability of users to share them, but have not yet implemented it in a single tweet.

Interestingly, Dorsey’s statement is in stark contrast to the position of Facebook, which advocates its decision to allow any political advertising on its platform, regardless of whether it is true or not.