https://tech.newstatesman.com/policy/twitter-facebook-political-advertising

Twitter’s decision to ban political adverts last week hasn’t delivered the sort of quick PR win its chief executive Jack Dorsey might have expected. The move, as Sarah Manavis wrote at the time, does little to address more pressing issues surrounding hate speech, fake news and the amplification of extremist political ideologies using bots. But it has succeeded in one crucial way: intensifying the pressure on Facebook and Google.

Almost as soon as Twitter announced the move, campaigners launched calls for its two rivals to either drop political ads altogether or create stricter rules around micro-targeting: the sort of tailored advertising at the centre of last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. But in a media briefing on Thursday afternoon, Facebook made it clear that, in the case of the UK election at least, it plans to do neither.