(VitalNews.org) – Twitter seems to be ever in flux these days. Ever since the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, bought the social media platform, many changes have been made in the name of freedom of speech according to Musk. The latest change will allow political ads.
Since purchasing the social media platform, Musk changed a substantial amount of things about Twitter, going as far as to completely rebrand the company as X to put his final mark on it. Before Musk bought the platform in October 2022, political ads were banned completely in 2019.
The ban on political ads was officially lifted in January when Twitter started to allow “cause-based ads” that are used to bring awareness to politically related issues like voter registration, and they vowed to expand the sort of ads that would be permitted regarding politics.
The decision to permit all political ads may be to help Twitter increase its revenue after losing many advertisers when Musk took over. Advertisers who fled cited concerns of misinformation and hate speech possibly appearing alongside their ads. Musk seems to be trying to turn Twitter into the internet’s “town square” for political discourse during election seasons, even going as far as to host the campaign announcement of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in May.
Meanwhile, Democratic pundits and lawmakers accuse the platform of not doing enough to combat false or misleading information on the platform. One of the ways Musk is dealing with that is to add a form of “fact-checking” on posts flagged as inaccurate, which will be accompanied by a correction or contextual statement.
Twitter is no small part of the political realm. Many cite former President Trump’s strategic use of the platform in the 2016 presidential election as one of the main reasons he was able to win. Trump used Twitter differently than previous presidents as his direct line of communication with the public and his voters.
A couple of days after the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, Trump was removed from Twitter. He vowed never to return, and even after Musk reinstated his account last year, Trump didn’t post. Then after his fourth indictment this year, and turning himself in to be booked in Fulton County, Georgia, Trump returned to Twitter by sharing his mugshot.
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