Twitter Banning Political Ads

Your move, Schmuckerberg --

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

A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

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

These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

And, swiping Schmuckerberg,

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! 😉”

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019

These are only a few tweets from Dorsey's thread; the entire thread is worth a read.

Whether this will resonate with the would- be Master of the Tech Universe Schmuckerberg remains to be seen (a small number of his employees have challenged his position on political ads), but it's a very welcome step in helping to put a dent in the flood of misinformation and the manipulation of our elections by malign actors here and abroad.