San Francisco, CA – Twitter announced it is banning all political ads before the 2020 election season. CEO Jack Dorsey announced the change on Twitter.
Twitter’s new policy will take effect on November 22. The company will release the finalized policy by November 15.
Apparently, Twitter considered only banning political advertisements from candidates, but decided that would leave open loopholes for issue ads. The social media platform will allow advertisements for voter registration.
We are curious to see how the carveout for voter registration ads works. Will it allow partisan groups to place advertisements? If so, this sounds like a workaround for partisan groups to contact voters.
We can see ad campaigns aimed at registering and activating impressionable (and often indoctrinated) students on college campuses. Perhaps the new advertising policy will address these possibilities. However, if it does not, Twitter risks creating an unfair political advertising market on its platform.
Dorsey also took a shot at Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, in a later tweet.
The ban is in stark contrast to Facebook’s approach. Zuckerberg recently faced backlash for refusing to censor political advertisements.
The landscape is shifting rapidly around online political advertisements. Where it settles by the 2020 election remains to be seen.
Not hard to see how this will go