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Twitter to ban all political advertising, raising pressure on Facebook
By Julia Carrie Wong. The Guardian.
Wed 30 Oct 2019

Social network’s move comes as Facebook faces controversy over ads that promote misinformation.

Twitter will ban all political advertising, the company’s CEO has announced, in a move that will increase pressure on Facebook over its controversial stance to allow politicians to advertise false statements. The new policy was announced via Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account on Wednesday and will come into effect on 22 November.
The announcement comes as Facebook is embroiled in a controversy over its decision to exempt ads by politicians from third-party factchecking and from a policy that bans false statements from paid advertisements.
The organic spread of political messages online “should not be compromised by money”, he wrote. The advanced state of digital advertising technology, including “machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting” and deepfakes – fake or manipulated videos that appear real – combined with the pollution of the online information ecosystem with misinformation, “present entirely new challenges to civic discourse”.
“This isn’t about free expression,” he added, in a seeming riposte to the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent defense of online political advertising in a speech billed as a “stand for voice and 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.”
Dorsey tweeted another counter-argument to Facebook with an accompanying winking emoji, writing: “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!’”
That argument appears to mock Facebook’s recent attempts to justify its decisions to exempt posts by politicians from its third-party factchecking program, and ads by politicians from a policy that bans false statements from paid advertisements.
Together, the policies have created a situation in which Facebook is simultaneously asserting its commitment to reducing misinformation while allowing incumbent politicians and political candidates to lie in paid campaign ads.
Dorsey called for “forward-looking political ad regulation”, noting that transparency requirements that have been proposed by US lawmakers 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,” he said.
Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, called Twitter’s decision “another attempt by the left to silence Trump and conservatives” while Hillary Clinton called it “the right thing to do for democracy in America and all over the world”.