Twitter stops political advertising globally

With a belief that reach for political messages should be earned not bought, Twitter has decided to stop political advertising globally.

In a thread, Twitter's CEO, Jack Dorsey announced that the platform is stopping all political advertising on a global level. "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," he wrote.

Twitter has raised the issue of how political advertising presents an entirely new challenge to civic discourse because of machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. "All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale," Jack says.

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The final policy around the topic would be shared by the media giant by November 11 and would include certain reasonable exceptions like voter registration awareness. The policy would be enforced from November 22.

In an attempt to define the ads that would come under scanner after this move, Vijaya Gadde, Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead at Twitter wrote, "Ads that refer to an election of a candidate or ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance like climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security and taxes."

Currently, the team is reading through suggestions that are pouring in online to understand the ecosystem better before announcing the whole policy on a global scale.