Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announces worldwide ban on political advertising:
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…🧵
— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019
“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. Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale…”
A cynic might add that Twitter made little money out of political advertising compared to Facebook…
Twitter fired 8% of their staff today and it appears the unlucky 336 employees in for the chop first found out when they tried to log into their Twitter accounts. This is how Bart Teeuwisse, one of Twitter’s Senior Software Engineers, found out he had been culled this morning:
I've been impacted by $TWTR's layoffs. This is how I found out this morning. pic.twitter.com/MbjFwYLcU2
— Bart Teeuwisse (@bartt) October 13, 2015
The layoffs are the first major move made by Jack Dorsey since he was made chief executive of Twitter last week. Looks like the social network is in big twubble...
