Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Twitter’s Political Ad Ban Is Disingenuous

The platform will continue spreading false political statements free of charge — and benefiting from it.

October 31, 2019 at 1:08 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Trump’s election thrust Twitter into the “global zeitgeist.”
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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Twitter Inc.’s decision to ban political ads appears to be designed to make the company look better than Facebook Inc., which has controversially lax political advertising rules. But let’s face it: Twitter benefits from political pronouncements without having to charge those who spew them.

In a Twitter thread announcing the ad ban, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey wrote: