After almost four years, Twitter is rolling back its ban on political advertising. The company announced on Tuesday that it was “relaxing” its “caused” advertising policy, which relates to political and social issues, and would make a similar move with overtly political ads in the coming weeks.
“We believe cause-based advertising can facilitate public conversation around important topics,” the company announced upon launch. Twitter security account. Going forward, we will align our advertising policy with that of television and other media. As with all policy changes, we will first ensure that our approach to reviewing and approving content protects people on Twitter.
The change removes one of the few remaining policies from a more progressive era in Twitter’s history that saw the company become a leader in content moderation. The company first banned political ads in 2019. At the time, social media criticism had reached fever pitch amid stories about the spread of misinformation during the 2016 US presidential election. After years of intentionally lax content moderation policies, the former CEO Jack Dorsey pushed Twitter to become the most proactive leading social media platform when it came to solving social issues online. Facebook and Google quickly followed suit with theirs of short time bans on political ads, but Twitter continued its ban years after Facebook and Google reintroduced politics to their platforms.
Elon Musk took Twitter far in the opposite direction. Musk proudly calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” saying you should be allowed to say anything on Twitter that isn’t illegal (although Musk does make exceptions to ban people for things like criticize or follow his private jet).
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But banning political ads may have as much to do with income as it does with ideology. Musk piloted Twitter’s advertising platform from a cliffscaring off many of his company members the biggest advertisers worried about hate speech is skyrocketing and other disreputable content during the Tesla CEO’s reign.
Twitter is unlikely to make much money from its new advertising policy – at the time of the initial ban on political ads, the company said political advertising did not bring in much revenue. But Twitter is apparently coping such serious financial problems– Musk has spoken openly about potential bankruptcy – that he can probably use all the money he can get.
Musk may be on the far end of the tech CEO spectrum when it comes to content moderation, but the tide has changed across the board. When Dorsey announced the political ban on Twitter ads in 2019, the ex-CEO tweeted that “the reach of the political message must be earned, not bought”. Dorsey has since changed his mind. More recently, Dorsey wrote This content moderation is, in general, a bad idea, and we should instead be moving towards a decentralized internet where no one company has the power to control public conversations.
Under Musk, Twitter repeatedly rolls back big policy changes in as little as 24 hours, so you can’t rely on the company’s suggestion to align its advertising policy with TV media. But to please the billionaire, it is worth pointing out the problems with this logic. In general, a television audience sees the exact same advertisements most of the time (although it changes). On the Internet, advertisers have the ability to micro-target different messages to specific people. This gives bigger spenders more power to tailor attempts to manipulate segments of the population and makes it harder for advertisers to be held accountable.
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