The social media app Twitter late Tuesday announced it planned to lift its three-year-old ban on political ads.
Twitter said it would immediately allow issue-based paid content on the site while political ads would be allowed to return “in the coming weeks.”
The announcement comes as advertisers have fled the platform since billionaire Elon Musk completed a $44 billion buyout of Twitter on October 27.
Musk’s takeover was followed by a spike in hate speech on Twitter. And last month Musk took heat from some Democratic lawmakers when he temporarily suspended several prominent journalists’ Twitter accounts that reported on an account that automatically tracked the flights of Musk’s private jet using publicly available data.
Twitter banned all political advertising in 2019, reacting to growing concern about misinformation spreading on social media.
Other major social media companies, including Meta’s Facebook and Google’s YouTube, do allow paid political content. ByteDance’s TikTok, however, maintains a ban on political advertising.
Political advertising reportedly makes up a very small percentage of Twitter’s overall revenue, accounting for less than $3 million in total spending for the 2018 U.S. midterm election. That’s compared to Twitter’s $3 billion in total revenue that year.
