Twitter has completely banned all political ads from all political candidates and sitting incumbents. The news came via a tweet from Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, on October 30th, 2019, where he stated that they would no longer allow political advertising on the social media platform.

Dorsey stated in the thread….

“We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.

 

“While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.

 

“Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale. These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.

 

“For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well…they can say whatever they want!

 

“We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we’re stopping these too. We’re well aware we‘re a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.

 

“In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.

 

“We’ll share the final policy by 11/15, including a few exceptions (ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed, for instance). We’ll start enforcing our new policy on 11/22 to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change goes into effect.

 

“A final note. This isn’t about free expression. 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.”

Sub-reddit KotakuInAction 2 pointed out that this could affect more of President Trump’s political opponents than Trump himself, given that even if he can’t use Twitter anymore to advertise, he certainly still has far more reach than every other politician vying to become President of the United States.

Trump simply has to use his Twitter account to inform his followers where he’ll be campaigning, where his next rally will be, or to donate in order to bolster his appeal for re-election, something that every other opponent lacks.

Strangely, Democratic hopefuls are actually supportive of Twitter’s decision, with Joe Biden’s deputy communications director, Bill Russo, telling ABC News…

“We appreciate that Twitter recognizes that they should not permit disproven smears, like those from the Trump campaign, to appear in advertisements on their platform. It would be unfortunate to suggest that the only option available to social media companies to do so is the full withdrawal of political advertising, but when faced with a choice between ad dollars and the integrity of our democracy, it is encouraging that, for once, revenue did not win out.”

Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale was not pleased with the results, however, believing that corrupt media outlets that lean Left will use this as a way to promote their own biased articles to attack Republicans, Conservatives, and President Trump while no other political opponents will be allowed to challenge their narrative.

Pascale told ABC News…

“Twitter just walked away from hundreds of millions of dollars of potential revenue, a very dumb decision for their stockholders. Will Twitter also be stopping ads from biased liberal media outlets who will now run unchecked as they buy obvious political content meant to attack Republicans? This is yet another attempt to silence conservatives, since Twitter knows President Trump has the most sophisticated online program ever known.”

We know that Google and YouTube have chosen to fix the elections as best they can, with the Alphabet-owned companies utilizing hidden algorithms and blacklisting tactics to fix search results in order to sway the 2020 elections. Now we’re finding out that Twitter is attempting to also fix the elections by barring political ads from all candidates, which will ultimately affect more Republicans than Democrats, given that like Pascale mentioned, almost every major mainstream news outlet leans Left, so even without advertising the news media will still prop up Liberal and Democratic candidates over Conservative and Republican candidates.