Twitter to ban all political advertising

Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the platform will ban all political advertising worldwide. The new policy regards candidate ads and will be entirely made available to the public on 15 November. Twitter explained that political messages should reach internet users when they follow an account. When candidates force highly optimised and targeted political messages on people, they bring significant risks to civic discourse. Also, machine learning-based optimisation of messaging, micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, fake news coupled with increasing technological velocity and overwhelming scale present risks to modern democracy. The new policy will include a few exceptions, including ads in support of voter registration. Twitter stressed that the new policy does not concern freedom of expression but only paying for reach.