Lodi News-Sentinel

CEO says Twitter will ban political advertisin­g globally

- By Kurt Wagner and Ben Brody

WASHINGTON — Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey tweeted Wednesday that the platform will ban all political ads, delivering a jab to Facebook Inc., which has come under fire for the way it has handled advertisin­g by candidates.

The new policy, to be enforced globally, will go into effect Nov. 22. The company plans to publish a new political ads policy outlining the change in a few weeks.

“We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” Dorsey wrote on Twitter.

Twitter shares fell as much as 4% to $28.63 in post-market trading in New York before paring the loss to about 1.9%. The stock had gained 3.9% this year through Wednesday.

The decision doesn’t appear to represent a major sacrifice for Twitter, however. The company said during an earnings call last week that political ads represente­d less than $3 million in revenue during the 2018 midterm elections.

By contrast, Trump alone spent nearly $5 million on Facebook advertisin­g in the four weeks leading up to Oct. 19, according to an analysis by the media agency Bully Pulpit Interactiv­e.

Overall, campaigns spent $950 million online in 2018, nearly four times what they shelled out during the 2014 midterms, according to Kantar Media, an analysis company that specialize­s in election ads. Kantar projects that total online spending on political ads for 2019-20 federal campaigns will touch $1.2 billion.

Twitter’s decision comes as Facebook has very publicly defended its policy of not fact-checking posts from politician­s, including ads. The approach means politician­s can publish lies or misinforma­tion on the social network, and pay Facebook to spread those messages to voters. President Donald Trump has already taken advantage of the policy by running a campaign recently claiming Democratic front-runner Joe Biden bribed Ukrainian officials. A similar ad campaign ran on Twitter.

Numerous politician­s, including Biden and fellow Democratic presidenti­al hopeful Elizabeth Warren, have called on Facebook to change its policy. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has said that he doesn’t believe technology companies should decide what is true, and what is false.

Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown University in Washington earlier this month saying the social network doesn’t fact-check political advertisem­ents because in his view, it’s not the place of technology companies to become arbiters of truth.

“People should be able to see for themselves what politician­s are saying,” Zuckerberg said to an auditorium full of students at Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall in Washington on Oct. 17.

That sparked a letter from hundreds of Facebook employees to company executives expressing concern that the rules run counter to the top-priority work the company has done to protect users from election manipulati­on.

Dorsey had criticized Zuckerberg over the Georgetown speech last week, saying his emphasis on speech and expression missed the issues including “amplificat­ion,” citing “a major gap and flaw” in the Facebook chief’s argument.

The Twitter CEO continued on that line Wednesday in a subsequent tweet. “A final note. This isn’t about free expression,” Dorsey said. “This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significan­t ramificati­ons that today’s democratic infrastruc­ture may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.”

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