Twitter’s Jack Dorsey has announced a ban of all political advertisements across the social media platform.
[referenced url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2019/10/even-facebook-employees-think-the-companys-political-speech-policy-is-awful/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/tczhupm4y8bunzvppou9.jpg” title=”Even Facebook Employees Think The Company’s Political Speech Policy Is Awful” excerpt=”Mark Zuckerberg has been roundly criticised by the press and lawmakers for his company’s incongruous new policy allowing politicians to make false claims in advertising on the platform. Adding to that growing wave of dissent, according to the New York Times: some of Facebook’s own employees, who call the move “a threat to what stands for.””]
In a long Twitter thread the CEO explained the company’s reason behind the ban, stating that political messages should be earned, not bought.
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
Dorsey went onto say that the power of advertising can be risky when applied to a politics.
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.
— jack ???????????? (@jack) October 30, 2019
While the company considered only banning candidate ads, a decision was made to blanket ban political advertising across the board.
“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,” said Dorsey.
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 ???????????? (@jack) October 30, 2019
Dorsey also called for more regulations around political advertisements, as well as ad transparency.
In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.
— jack ???????????? (@jack) October 30, 2019
As the U.S. presedential election looms, pressure on social media sites regarding political advertising has increased.
Facebook has chosen to continue running political advertisements on its platform, even if they contain misleading information.
In fact, Twitter’s move comes only a month after Facebook provided extensions to its newsworthiness exemption, which allows posts to remain on site “if we believe the public interest in seeing it outweighs the risk of harm.” That exemption was largely brought in “to treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard.”
Some Facebook workers have spoken out against this decision. In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, these employees called for a number of changes, including the restriction of targeted political ads and stronger differentiation between these ads and organic posts.
The letter also stated, “Misinformation shared by political advertisers has an outsized detrimental impact on our community. We should not accept money for political ads without applying the standards that our other ads have to follow.”
Twitter’s ban on political advertisements will come into effect on November 23 in Australia, with further details regarding the ban to be released by November 16.