Twitter’s move to ban political ads comes as the UK enters a six-week general election campaign, one that will be more influenced by social media than ever before. For various reasons – including the British November and December weather -, online will form a key element for the general election campaigns. This is a trend we have seen in UK political campaigning over the past five years, now with almost half of campaign spending used online. Online campaigning has the benefit of targeted messaging, and Twitter’s decision will make this a little more difficult.
It is the right thing to do though: in a YouGov poll from earlier this year, 80% of people said they are in strong favour of regulating political ads on social media sites. Twitter follows ByteDance’s TikTok which announced a ban on all political advertising a few weeks ago – even if a large part of the platform’s audience is too young to vote.
