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| Twitter Will Ban All Political Ads, C.E.O. Dorsey Says | |
| (32 minutes later) | |
| SAN FRANCISCO — Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said on Wednesday that the social media service would ban political ads on its platform, in a stark contrast to rival Facebook, which has faced blowback for taking a hands-off approach to political advertising. | SAN FRANCISCO — Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said on Wednesday that the social media service would ban political ads on its platform, in a stark contrast to rival Facebook, which has faced blowback for taking a hands-off approach to political advertising. |
| Mr. Dorsey announced the decision on Twitter, saying he believed that the reach of political messages “should be earned, not bought.” He said online political ads present challenges to civic discourse, including manipulated videos and the viral spread of misleading information “all at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.” He added that he worried that political advertising on the internet “has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.” | |
| Twitter has long allowed political ads, though it began taking steps more recently to curtail them. After the 2016 American presidential election, the company began requiring advertisers to verify their identities and it published a database of political ads that ran on its service. More recently, it banned ads from state-backed media outlets after it traced misinformation about the protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city of Hong Kong to state-backed media outlets in China. | |
| The move is likely to pressure Facebook, which has lately faced heat for allowing politicians to run any claims — even false ones — in political ads on the social network. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, has taken a stand on political advertising in recent weeks, saying that he would not police politicians’ ads even if they lied in them. He said that was because Facebook had been founded to give people a voice and because the social network stood for free expression. Politicians’ ads, he said, were newsworthy and added to public discourse. | |
| That position has been highly unpopular among lawmakers, presidential candidates and even some of Facebook’s own employees. The campaign of the former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. recently blasted Facebook for its refusal to remove a false ad about Mr. Biden that was being run by President Trump’s campaign. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat who is also running for president, has called out Mr. Zuckerberg for running a “disinformation-for-profit machine.” And over the last two weeks, hundreds of employees at Facebook signed a letter to Mr. Zuckerberg asking him to reconsider how Facebook treats political ads. | |
| In a veiled dig at Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Dorsey said that the fight against online disinformation is hampered if technology companies accept payment for misleading political content. Without naming Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Dorsey said it was not credible for tech companies to say they were working hard against misinformation “buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want!” | |
| Political ads make up only a small portion of the company’s advertising business, Twitter said. |