Twitter relaxes ban on political ads

Twitter has lifted a long-standing ban on political advertising in the US. The company will again allow companies to advertise around political topics. Twitter is also going to relax the rules around political advertisements.

The network registers that a tweet, although it provides little additional information. Twitter is making two policy changes: it will relax cause-based ads and it will relax the policy around allowing political ads. At least that applies to ads in the United States. Twitter says it wants to align its advertising policies with those of television or other media.

Cause-based ads are ads that revolve around a particular political or social issue, such as abortion or climate change. There was no absolute ban on Twitter, but there were rules. Such advertisements were allowed, but only if they did not take a political or legal position. Also, such ads could not be shown via microtargeting only to specific groups, but only to groups within a broad geographic environment.

Twitter is now going to relax the policy around those ads, says the company. What exactly that means should become clear in the future, but the company hints that the existing restrictions will be lifted.

In addition, the policy for advertisements from politicians or political groups will be relaxed. Twitter banned all political ads at the end of 2019. This means that politicians or political parties were no longer allowed to purchase advertisements. That policy was mainly aimed at American politics, where advertisements are often purchased by political action committees. Other individuals and groups were also no longer allowed to place advertisements about candidates or parties, or about policies or court decisions.

That policy is also now being relaxed, Twitter says, but it will not give more details about it until “in the coming weeks”. Twitter says it will continue to monitor and review ads to ensure they are within the terms and conditions.

Twitter isn’t the only social network to ban or restrict political advertising. This also happened at Google and Facebook, which took the measures in 2019 and 2020 in the run-up to the US presidential elections.