Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) doesn’t believe Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey is making the right move when it comes to globally banning all political advertisements.
Dorsey made the move when he announced this week that the social media platform would be banning the advertisement because, as he suggested, “political message reach should be earned, not bought.”
Twitter will be sharing its new policy on November 15, which will then go into effect on November 22.
Twitter’s decision has sparked questions from some Democratic politicians toward Facebook on if they’ll do the same. Facebook’s policy doesn’t require fact-checking for advertisements by politicians.
Cruz, however, isn’t so sure Twitter made the right decision, as he wrote an op-ed for The Hill published Thursday evening titled, “Mark Zuckerberg is right, Jack Dorsey is wrong.”
The Republican lawmaker cited the importance of defending freedom of speech in his reasoning.
“Facebook has expressed its desire to stand for free speech – and while it still has a long way to go, these are very positive developments,” Cruz wrote, adding, “Twitter, on the other hand, is moving in the opposite direction.”
Cruz added that for Facebook to move in the direction that Twitter is, it “would be profoundly harmful” — his explanation being for two reasons.
“First, if banning political ads – from candidates, groups, or individual citizens – becomes the norm, that only stands to benefit two groups: incumbent politicians and the mainstream media,” Cruz wrote.
Secondly, Cruz wrote, “Twitter’s ban only further empowers Silicon Valley billionaires, who already have a stronghold on defining what is truthful or acceptable speech, to now define what is and what is not ‘political.’ It’s up to them to determine where to draw the line – and they won’t stop here. Banning ads is just the beginning.”
As IJR previously reported, Zuckerberg, however, has faced criticism from “The Social Network” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, as Sorkin blasted the Facebook CEO in The New York Times op-ed for “not defending free speech,” but instead, “assaulting truth.”