Twitter on Tuesday announced plans to scale back its ban on political ads and allow more “cause-based” advertising on the platform.
“We believe that cause-based advertising can facilitate public conversation around important topics. Today, we’re relaxing our ads policy for cause-based ads in the US. We also plan to expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks,” the company’s safety team tweeted.
“Moving forward, we will align our advertising policy with that of TV and other media outlets,” Twitter said.
The social media platform banned all political ads back in 2019, a move championed by Twitter co-founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey.
Dorsey said at the time that paying to increase the reach of political messages on the platform can make the decision to follow an account or retweet a post “compromised by money.”
The switch to allow the ads comes amid a number of tweaks to Twitter under new CEO Elon Musk, whose tenure leading the social media giant has been rife with controversy.
Just weeks after Musk’s late October takeover of the company, Twitter reportedly lost half of its top advertisers, and advocacy groups pushed advertisers to walk away from the platform over content moderation concerns.
Musk has sought to assure advertisers that Twitter would remain stable even under lifted content moderation and other changes to the platform, like changes to its user verification and cuts to staff.