Twitter執行長Jack Dorsey，於本周三在自己的Twitter帳號宣布這項新政策，此政策將於11月 22日起實施，並對全球性的選舉事務、政治事件廣告產生影響。

The new policy, announced via Jack Dorsey’sTwitteraccount on Wednesday, will come into effect on 22 November and will apply globally to all electioneering ads, as well as ads related to political issues.

Twitter這項宣告，不免讓人想到Facebook早前，豁免對政治人物投放的廣告實施第三方事實查核的爭議決定，即使這些付費廣告有時帶有虛假陳述（false statements）。

The announcement comes as Facebook is embroiled in acontroversyover its decision to exempt ads by politicians from third-party factchecking and from a policy that bans false statements from paid advertisements.

Dorsey解釋Twitter這項政策改變，確實是受到Facebook過去幾週的爭議而決定實行。 他認為政治訊息的傳播「不應跟金錢妥協」，在數位廣告技術日漸發展的情況下，包含「以機器學習為基礎的訊息與精準投放與深偽（Deep Fake）」，都讓線上資訊生態受到虛假資訊的污染。

The organic spread of political messages online “should not be compromised by money”, he wrote. The advanced state of digital advertising technology, including “machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting” and deepfakes – fake or manipulated videos that appear real – combined with the pollution of the online information ecosystem with misinformation.

因此Dorsey認為「這不代表言論自由」，這似乎是對Facebook執行長Mark Zuckerberg先前提出的「提供發聲與言論自由」管道表達反諷。 Dorsey表示，「這代表的只是付費與觸及，付的錢多就能提高政治演說的觸及，這將造成的重大影響，是現今的民主框架尚未準備好應對的。」

“This isn’t about free expression,” he added, in a seeming riposte to the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent defense of online political advertising in aspeech billed as a “stand for voice and free expression”. “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. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.”

而美國的政治陣營亦對此表達不同意見，熱愛在Twitter發文的美國總統川普陣營駁斥Twitter此舉，「企圖弱化川普與保守派的聲音」（“another attempt by the left to silence Trump and conservatives”），而2016年總統大選敗給川普的希拉蕊則大讚此舉「是對美國與全世界民主的正確作法」（“the right thing to do for democracy in America and all over the world”）。

 〈Twitter to ban all political advertising, raising pressure on Facebook〉原文連結