Twitter will be more and more policy. The red social commanded by Elon Musk will re-enable political ads and it will soften the ban established in 2019 to try to obtain a new source of income.
Thus, it will allow both elected officials and activist groups to pay again to amplify their messages about specific political causes and try to be more influential with voters. “In the coming weeks” that will be extended to other types of political advertising.
“We believe that the advertising with cause can facilitate public conversation about important topics. Today we are relaxing our policy for ads with cause in the United States. We also plan to expand the political advertising that we allow in the coming weeks,” the company explained in a message posted on Tuesday.
“Looking forward, we will align our advertising policy with that of television and other media,” they added in another tweet.
revenue drop
With this, Musk seeks to open new avenues of income to reinforce the weak business of Twitter, which he bought for 44,000 million dollars. Since he took control of the company in October, the pressure to make this gigantic investment profitable has led the tycoon to introduce a series of changes – from being able to buy the blue account verification badge to allowing misinformation about the covid again – that they have driven many away en masse advertisersthe basis of its economic model.
Before Musk’s arrival, 90% of Twitter’s revenue came from advertising. According to company data in 2018, political ads accounted for a very small part of the total ad revenue generated.
This decision puts Twitter on a par with other platforms such as Facebook o Youtubewhich already allow the publication of paid political content, something that, however, others such as TikTok.
The founder and former CEO of the company, Jack Dorsey, banned some political ads in November 2019, imposing certain restrictions such as customizing ads to target specific groups of people. Then, he assured that allowing paid partisan propaganda would have “significant ramifications that the current democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.”