Twitter stops advertising with political content

Advertisements on Twitter are, for example, tweets that can be placed in users' news streams for a fee - even if they don't follow that account. The stop on political advertising is to take effect on November 22, and the detailed rules are to be presented a week before that.

The debate about political advertising is gaining momentum in the U.S. one year before the 2020 presidential election. In recent weeks, Facebook in particular has come under increasing criticism for its decision not to have ads with political content checked by the online network's fact-checking partners. In addition, Facebook decided not to do anything when politicians spread false or misleading information.

Facebook continues to focus on political advertising

In contrast to Twitter, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to continue to allow political messages to be disseminated as advertising. He confirmed this on Wednesday immediately after the Twitter announcement in a conference call on the latest quarterly figures. A ban on political advertising would also affect ads on topics such as climate protection or feminism, for example, he pointed out.At the same time, he said

Zuckerberg, ads from politicians are likely to account for just 0.5 percent of Facebook's revenue in the coming year. Even if this figure sounds small, even a very conservative estimate of Facebook's future business would mean significantly more than $300 million.

Dorsey indirectly criticized Facebook's position. Twitter would lose credibility if, on the one hand, the company said it was doing everything it could to curb the spread of misleading information, but at the same time allowed it to be spread for a fee. Nor did Dorsey accept the argument put forward by Facebook, among others, that political advertising is about freedom of speech. "This is not about freedom of expression. This is about paying for reach," he wrote. And that could have significant consequences "for which today's democratic infrastructure may not be prepared."

Misleading info from Trump camp

During the 2016 presidential election, posts from Russia had been widely disseminated on Facebook and Twitter as advertisements intended to increase tensions in U.S. society and, in some cases, directly supported today's President Donald Trump.

The recent debate was fueled, among other things, by an ad from the Trump camp with misleading information about Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden. The CNN network refused to air it - but Facebook did not. Zuckerberg stressed that online networks should not decide what is false or factually correct.

Trump's campaign team criticized Twitter's move as another attempt to suppress conservative voices. The U.S. president communicates a lot on Twitter. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rising Democratic political star, on the other hand, praised the "ethical decision."

Advantage for incumbents

Dorsey acknowledged that critics might accuse Twitter of favoring incumbents with the ad freeze. "But we've witnessed many political movements reach massive proportions without any political advertising." Twitter had also considered stopping ads only from election candidates, Dorsey wrote. But such a ban would have been unfair and easy to circumvent, which is why they decided to make a radical cut, he explained.

Meanwhile, Twitter suspends its rules against insults or hate speech for politicians' remarks that are not disseminated as ads, if the tweets are newsworthy. The short message service had also come under criticism for this, particularly because of controversial tweets from Trump.

Facebook is much bigger than Twitter, with around 2.45 users. According to the last comparable figures, the short message service had around 330 million active users. In the meantime, Twitter only discloses how many users the company can reach with its advertising - most recently, that was 145 million. (SDA)