X, the company previously known as Twitter, says it will allow political advertisements on its social media site in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.
The company had paused political ads on its platform in 2019 ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and later suspended the account of former U.S. President Donald Trump following the January 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
Now, X says it will resume running political advertisements and is planning to hire security to help protect its election teams ahead of the upcoming U.S. presidential election that is scheduled for November 2024.
“We’re currently expanding our safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts, and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats,” the company said in a blog post.
The return of political advertisements, which can often be divisive and polarizing, comes after months of changes to the platform and how it handles content after Elon Musk bought it in October 2022.
Shortly after his takeover of Twitter, Musk laid off thousands of staff, including many employees responsible for safety, platform manipulation and election policy.
More recently, Musk has rebranded Twitter as X, changing both the company’s name and logo.
The banning of political ads on the social media platform has led to charges of censorship. X says that, going forward, it will continue to apply its civic integrity policy to political ads.
The company added that it will prohibit the use of its platform for content that misleads people about political candidates and where to vote.
Twitter had effectively ended political advertising in 2019 amid concerns that its platform was being used to spread false and misleading information, including by foreign actors.
The new blog post stated that X plans to create a “global advertising transparency center” to help police political ads in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
X is a privately held company. Its stock does not trade on a public exchange.
