Musk’s X platform allows political advertising again

Elon Musk’s online platform X (formerly Twitter) will allow advertising with political content again after about four years. The ban imposed in October 2019 in the United States must first be lifted, according to a blog post on Tuesday. The company’s then president, Jack Dorsey, justified the stop by saying that political access should be earned, not bought. The X now stands for the service’s commitment to freedom of expression.

Meanwhile, the platform confirmed that there will be some rules for the paid posting of political messages. Therefore, false or misleading information is prohibited. This included distortions intended to undermine public confidence in the legitimacy of the elections.

These restrictions could place limits on how former President Donald Trump and his supporters can 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 by fraud. X owner Elon Musk is reactivating a long-banned Trump account on the service. So far, the ex-president has only used it once: posting his historically unique image of the police. Other than that, Trump prefers to be active on his own version of Twitter, Truth Social. However, he currently only has 6.4 million subscribers – while on X he has regained over 80 million followers on Twitter.

Since Musk bought Twitter for about $44 billion last October, the service has been plagued by revenue problems, among other things. Musk recently admitted that ad revenue is still half of what it was before the acquisition. The blog entry also mentioned that X is currently expanding teams that are supposed to spot manipulation and fake accounts. After the acquisition, Musk laid off more than half of Twitter’s roughly 7,000 employees. According to media reports, the departments responsible for platform security were also severely affected.