Back in 2019, Twitter banned political ads. This was the logic at the time:
The idea intended to be made manifest in these policies is that “political message reach should be earned, not bought,” as the company puts it. It’s hard to argue with that (but Facebook will anyway). The new rules apply globally and to all ad types.
It’s important to make clear at the outset that Twitter is not banning political content, it is banning the paid promotion of that content. Every topic is fair game and every person or organization on Twitter can pursue their cause as before — they just can’t pay to get their message in front of more eyeballs.
Fast forward to today. That seems to have changed based on this Tweet:
My feeling is that this has nothing to do with Elon’s “free speech” agenda. It likely has more to do with the fact that Twitter needs money and with a presidential election two years away, a lot of political groups not to mention the two major parties in the US will be doing lots of advertising to get their messages out. Thus Elon is going to try to grab his share of that political ad spending to fill in his revenue holes from advertisers fleeing the platform.
Two things that I should note on this. Like everything else that Elon has done since he took over Twitter, there’s no details here on how this will work. Which is another example of his “ready, fire, aim” mentality. The second thing is that Elon in the past has promised to run polls on major policy changes like this. But that hasn’t happened here. Which implies to me that Elon is doing this because he needs money now.
Let’s see what happens with this as like everything else that Elon has done with Twitter, this is likely to become another train wreck next to a dumpster fire.
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This entry was posted on January 4, 2023 at 8:38 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Twitter Is Apparently Going To Allow Political Ads… Presumably To Boost Revenue
Back in 2019, Twitter banned political ads. This was the logic at the time:
The idea intended to be made manifest in these policies is that “political message reach should be earned, not bought,” as the company puts it. It’s hard to argue with that (but Facebook will anyway). The new rules apply globally and to all ad types.
It’s important to make clear at the outset that Twitter is not banning political content, it is banning the paid promotion of that content. Every topic is fair game and every person or organization on Twitter can pursue their cause as before — they just can’t pay to get their message in front of more eyeballs.
Fast forward to today. That seems to have changed based on this Tweet:
My feeling is that this has nothing to do with Elon’s “free speech” agenda. It likely has more to do with the fact that Twitter needs money and with a presidential election two years away, a lot of political groups not to mention the two major parties in the US will be doing lots of advertising to get their messages out. Thus Elon is going to try to grab his share of that political ad spending to fill in his revenue holes from advertisers fleeing the platform.
Two things that I should note on this. Like everything else that Elon has done since he took over Twitter, there’s no details here on how this will work. Which is another example of his “ready, fire, aim” mentality. The second thing is that Elon in the past has promised to run polls on major policy changes like this. But that hasn’t happened here. Which implies to me that Elon is doing this because he needs money now.
Let’s see what happens with this as like everything else that Elon has done with Twitter, this is likely to become another train wreck next to a dumpster fire.
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This entry was posted on January 4, 2023 at 8:38 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.