Twitter reverses longstanding ban on political advertising

Twitter said it was relaxing its ban on political and issue-based advertising on Tuesday, a reversal of the company’s long-standing approach to paid political speech.

The policy change, which comes at a moment when major advertisers are defecting from the beleaguered social media platform, would allow candidates and advocacy groups to spend money to promote themselves and their causes on the service.

“We believe that cause-based advertising can facilitate public conversation around important topics. Today, we’re relaxing our ads policy for cause-based ads in the US. We also plan to expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks,” the tweet said.

A second tweet clarified that the company would firstensure that its approach “to reviewing and approving content protects people on Twitter.”

Twitter has long taken what it described as a principled stance against political advertising. When then-CEO Jack Dorsey announced the political ads bans in 2019, he said it was because he strongly believed that political messaging “should be earned, not bought.” That language was then posted on the company’s website, and was still there as of Tuesday afternoon.

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The sudden reversal was characteristic of the slapdash and chaotic manner in which Twitter is being run under its new owner, billionaire Elon Musk. The company announced the change in a vaguely-worded tweet that promised to “share more details” as the work got underway. There was no explanation of why Twitter made the changes or how extensive the changes would be.

Twitter’s political ads ban has never been particularly popular with politicians and advocacy groups, who have complained that it is unfair to limit all advertising simply because some political advertising contains misinformation. Facebook went in the opposite direction ahead of the 2020 election, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg arguing that it was not the company’s responsibility to fact-check political ads, and that such ads would be allowed to run on the service.

Political ads were also relatively inconsequential for Twitter’s business. At the time of the ads ban, the company’s chief financial officer said that political ads brought in roughly $3 million in revenue - a tiny fraction of a multi-billion dollar ad business on the platform.