Last week, Twitter announced that they are set to ban all political advertisements from its media platform. Many have already complained and are curious as to how a political advertisement is defined. Others also say that this has put pressure on Facebook to adjust or even abolish their controversial political advertisement policy.
Adam Bozzi, communications director for End Citizens United, comments, “The bottom line here is that individual companies shouldn’t be doing self-regulation. Neither allowing candidates to lie nor shutting down altogether is the answer. The answer is that we need a set of rules and investigative and enforcement mechanisms that end the wild west era of digital advertising.”
Political advertisements have never had a large impact on the site’s community or its finances. Twitter is a place to voice opinions on anything and everything, which is why there has been such an uproar of controversy since the announcement. Of course, it is not ideal to absorb false political ads while scrolling through twitter, but who is to say someone else will not tweet out the false information? Bans can be placed on anything, but it is going to be difficult to define what is a political ad and what is false. There will always be loopholes in the system, and it is going to be difficult to monitor ads that don’t fit identically to the criteria for termination.
On the contrary, many other social media platforms such as Tik Tok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest have already banned political advertising and have proven to be successful. This is not to say that political figures are banned from the platforms, just their advertisements. However, many conservative politicians are speaking out saying that they will be silenced and attacked by the liberal populations.
President Trump’s campaign manager for the 2020 election, Brad Parscale, said that Twitter’s decision is biased and will only be used to silence conservative politicians, not liberals. He went on to say that the decision will have a negative impact on its shareholders and that it was a “very dumb decision.”
On the contrary, “If a company cannot or does not wish to run basic fact-checking on paid political advertising, then they should not run paid political ads at all.” says Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Twitter has caused a large amount of controversy within the past couple of weeks, but they seem to be sticking with their statement and are applying pressure on other sites, especially Facebook, to follow in their footsteps. It will be interesting to see how Twitter defines political ads in its official policy and how this affects the upcoming elections.
