Jack Dorsey responding to the claim that the new Twitter Policy may favour incumbent leaders said, “Many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising”.
New York: From November 22 onwards, Twitter is banning all political ads globally, according to the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey. He tweeted about this on Wednesday.
The changes will affect both candidate ads and issue ads, although ads encouraging voter registration will still be allowed, along with other exceptions. Dorsey said a full policy will be made available to the public on November 15th.
Dorsey said Some might argue our actions could favour incumbents and we have witnessed many social movements reach a massive scale without any political ads.
Earlier, Joe Biden the Ex vice president of the USA and 2020 presidential candidate campaign penned letters to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube asking that they refuse to run false or misleading political ads. Biden’s campaign had become the target of a series of ads placed by President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign that made baseless claims regarding Biden family’s relationship with the Ukrainian government.
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
How does Dorsey clarify this ban?
Dorsey explained his position in a thread of tweets. Dorsey said Internet political ads presented “entirely new challenges to civic discourse”.These challenges included “machine learning-based optimization of messaging”, “micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes”.
“It’s not credible,” he wrote, “for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, but if someone pays us to target and force people to see the political advertise they can say whatever they want!’”
Dorsey added Countering the argument that the new policy might be seen as favouring leaders already in office, that “many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising”. Ads do support voter registration and would not be affected by the ban.
How does the world react to the ban?
Hillary Clinton, the former presidential Democratic candidate, welcomed Twitter’s ban and appeared to challenge Facebook to rethink its stance.
Social media analyst Carl Miller said it was “one of the first times a technology giant has stepped back in concern for the enormous disruptions they’re doing to the institutions that don’t move as quickly as them”.
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