In a series of late afternoon tweets Wednesday, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced the social media giant will be banning all paid political ads, minus voter registration campaigns, effective Nov. 22.
“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,” he said. “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,” Dorsey said.
Translation: Twitter is putting its big political thumb on the scale — once again — to help Democrats leading into the next election cycle.
It’s no secret that social media networks, with Twitter leading the charge, have been unfairly censoring Trump supporters online in recent years to give Democrats a big advantage during the last midterm election and the 2020 election cycle.
It’s well known that the Trump campaign and RNC are blowing away Democrats in the fundraising game — hence they’ve got significantly more money available to spend on political ads.
“The RNC has consistently outraised the DNC by large margins this year, and the GOP committee had 53.8 million on hand at the end of August compared with the DNC’s 8.2 million,” reports Politico.
Knowing full well that using social media helped fuel Trump’s victory in 2016, the Big Tech companies — run by hard-left activists — are now running defense for the DNC, which is a pauper by comparison.
Note that in the third quarter alone this year the Trump reelection campaign and RNC raised a whopping $125 million, far outstripping Democrats.
But this isn’t just about money.
By forbidding political ads and issue advertisements, Twitter is also dismantling #FreeSpeech before our eyes as the First Amendment protects all speech, not just the speech billionaire tech executives like or dislike.
Winner? Democrat candidates who are being far outspent online by their GOP rivals now have allies in Silicon Valley effectively neutralizing that advantage, while they continue to shut out conservative social media users’ voices.
Americans should boycott Twitter until it reverses course on ads, and restores fairness to its platform.
*story by Boston Herald