WASHINGTON: Twitter’s Chief executive officer (CEO) Jack Dorsey has announced to ban political advertising globally on its platform.
The CEO said, “While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics.”
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He added, “Where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.”
According to Jack Dorsey, the new policy, details will be unveiled next month and enforced from 22nd November, all ads on political issues as well as from candidates will be banned.
He said, “We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to avoid.”
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Dorsey further said, “Additionally, it is not fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we’re stopping these too.”
Dorsey added that the company took the action to head off potential problems from machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes.
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The move made by Twitter comes in contrast to the Facebook policy that allows political speech and ads to run without fact-checking on the leading social network.
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