The social network with the blue bird has decided to no longer accept political ads. On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg defended them, even if they contain lies or untruths.

Twitter launched a huge pound in the pond Wednesday announcing that the social network will no longer accept any advertising of a political nature anywhere in the world.

We have made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons ...

- jack (@jack) October 30, 2019

"We believe that the reach of a political message must be earned, not bought," tweeted Jack Dorsey, the network's co-founder and CEO, before a long series of micro-messages detailing his decision. In particular, he explains that a political message gains in audience thanks to subscriptions to an account or retweets. "Paying for the audience removes that choice and imposes perfectly optimized and targeted political messages on people," said Dorsey, adding, "We believe this decision should not be polluted with money."

"Political ads represent a whole new challenge to public discourse"

This choice contrasts sharply with that of Facebook, the world's leading social network. Mark Zuckerberg recently defended political messages on his network, including whether they contained lies or untruths, in the name of freedom of expression. Jack Dorsey responds directly to his alter-ego. "For us, it's not credible to say, 'We work hard to prevent people from circumventing the rules of our systems to spread false information but if someone pays us to aim and force people to see their advertising politics ... so they can say what they want! '", he said.

Twitter, like Facebook or Google, derives most of its revenue from advertising, often targeted in an ultra-fine way thanks to the wide variety of data collected each time users use the networks. For @Jack, "political ads represent a whole new challenge to public discourse", and to quote: the artificial intelligence that makes the impact of messages more effective, the micro-targeting that can reach people that it is necessary, false information that is not verified and "deep fakes" (photos or videos rigged hyper-realistic, ed). All more and more quickly, "in a more sophisticated way and to unmanageable volumes".