Twitter rejects Facebook's faulty logic and stops running political ads

Twitter will cease running paid political ads.

The announcement, made Wednesday afternoon by Jack Dorsey, is in stark contrast to Facebook's controversial decision to allow politicians to pay to spread lies. It's a smart move, and, despite Mark Zuckerberg's protestations, Dorsey makes clear that it has nothing to do with free speech.

As the Twitter CEO rightly points out, the policy will not prevent politicians from tweeting, but rather will prevent them and their teams from using his company's advanced micro-targeting service to gain paidexposure.

"This isn’t about free expression," tweeted Dorsey. "This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle."

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This policy change, which goes into effect on Nov. 22, also includes a ban on "issue ads." Although Twitter makes an attempt to define it, it's not 100 percent clear what constitutes an issue ad — does advocating protecting a woman's right to an abortion count, for example — and we'll have to see how Twitter handles this potentially more delicate aspect of the new rules.

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Notably, in the 11-tweet thread, Dorsey calls bullshit on Mark Zuckerberg's appropriately maligned insistence that he doesn't "think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy."

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We reached out to Facebook in order to determine if Twitter's new policy has impacted Mark Zuckerberg's thinking on the matter of paid political advertisements. We received no immediate response.

Dorsey's thread, which you should read in its entirety, is sure to please critics of Facebook's decision to allow politicians to lie about opponents in paid ads. It reads as more than just a reaction to that, however, as it also addresses the larger problems inherent in online targeted advertising.

"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," he tweeted. "All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale."

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Dorsey writes that a full explanation of the new policy will be published by Nov. 15. In the meantime, the ball is firmly back in Facebook's court.

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If the past is any indication, it's only a matter of time before the Mark Zuckerberg-helmed social media giant fumbles it — forcing yet another insincere apology from the man who seems to think he could have single-handedly averted the Iraq war.