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Musk’s X-Platform allows political advertising again
Political advertising was not permitted on the online platform X (formerly Twitter) for around four years. photo
© Monika Skolimowska/dpa
Advertising with political content was not permitted on the online platform for around four years – that is about to change. But there are rules.
The then boss Jack Dorsey justified the stop by saying that political reach had to be earned and not bought. X now referred to a commitment by the service to free speech.
X names rules
At the same time, the platform emphasized that there will be some rules for the paid dissemination of political messages. So it is forbidden to place false or misleading information. This included misrepresentations aimed at undermining public confidence in the legitimacy of elections.
These restrictions could set limits on how ex-President Donald Trump and his supporters use X in the 2024 presidential campaign. Despite all the facts, Trump continues to claim that his victory in the last presidential election was only stolen through fraud. X owner Elon Musk is reactivating Trump’s long-banned account on the service. So far, the ex-president has only used it once: he published his historically unique police photo. Otherwise, Trump prefers to be active on his own Twitter copy, Truth Social. However, he currently only has 6.4 million subscribers there – while at X he got his more than 80 million Twitter followers back.
Since Musk bought Twitter for around $44 billion last October, the service has been struggling with revenue problems, among other things. Musk recently admitted that advertising revenue is still half what it was before the acquisition. The blog entry also said that X is currently expanding the teams that are supposed to recognize manipulation and fake accounts. After the takeover, Musk laid off more than half of the approximately 7,000 Twitter employees. According to media reports, the departments responsible for platform security were also badly affected.