Twitter Follows Google In Banning Advertisers That Deny Climate Change

thewrap.com:

reported by AP and other news sources, Twitter said: “Ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis.” In 2021, Twitter began featuring a dedicated Climate Topic on its site and offered what it called “pre-bunks” during last year’s United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, to counter a predicted avalanche of misinformation expected to arise on social media surrounding the conference.

The new policy follows a similar ban announced in October by Google, which said in a statement that it would no longer display advertisements on YouTube videos and other content that promote information “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” The statement did not contain any information suggesting that the new policy would effect what Twitter users are allowed to post on the site.

Twitter policy already states that users may not post “violent, hateful, or adult content within areas that are highly visible on Twitter, including in live video, profile, header, or List banner images” unless the account doing the posting has been marked “sensitive,” which places images and videos behind a warning message that must be acknowledged before the media can be viewed.

In January, Twitter also introduced new privacy settings that allow users to limit data-sharing with advertisers.This news comes at the same time the European Union (EU) announced that it has adopted the Digital Services Act, an agreement requiring big companies — including Google and Facebook parent Meta — to police their platform in order to protect European users from hate speech, disinformation and other harmful online content.