JACK DORSEY: No more political advertisements on Twitter
Jack Dorsey, Twitter Founder has issued a notice that Twitter Inc will no longer advertise politics on the platform globally from November 22, 2019, stating that political messages should be earned not bought. Jack said this on Wednesday through a tweet thread that has received over 50, 000 retweets. “We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” said Jack.
Jack stated that political advertisement forces highly optimized political messages on the people rather that than getting a genuine reach when people decide to follow or retweet the messages from the political or politicians’ accounts. This financial ability to sponsor tweets to reach the people by ‘force’ poses risk to the politics of authenticity across the world, hence affecting millions and millions of lives of the people through influenced votes.
“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,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted.
The new significant shift in Twitter policies comes at a moment Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is facing a lot of pressure and criticism trying to defend his company, Facebook, on the same issues of fact-checking political ads messages.
Jack Dorsey has reiterated that the ban is not about suppressing freedom of expression, but the protection of democratic infrastructure by control of paid ads that aim to increase political reach. “We have witnessed many social movements reach a massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.” Jack Dorsey tweeted.
The social media guru said they considered stopping ads for the US Presidential candidates but found it unfair. “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.”
Joe Biden, earlier this month, wrote letters to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube requesting them to stop running false and misleading political ads. According to Joe, Donald Trump had placed a series of baseless political advertisements targeting his family’s relationship with the Ukrainian government.
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Jack Dorsey finally noted that there is a need for forward-looking political ad regulations saying the existing ad transparency requirements proposed by the US lawmakers were not enough. “The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field,” he said.
Twitter will issue a detailed statement regarding the same for the public on November 15, and to address all the questions that would have been raised before the ban takes effect.
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