France since late last year requires online political campaigns to declare who paid for them, and how much was spent.
It requires online platforms to provide “fair, clear and transparent” information about the person or company, and the amount paid, in an open and accessible database format.
But Twitter has rejected a government voter registration campaign due to the new law.
The company could not find a solution to obey the letter of the new law, officials said – and opted to avoid the potential problem altogether.
The #OuiJeVote (Yes, I Vote) campaign encouraged voters to register for the European elections ahead of the deadline.
It was operated by the French government information service, which had planned to pay for sponsored tweets, according to news agency AFP.
The government information service told AFP news agency:
“Twitter does not know how to do that today, and so decided to have a completely hard-line policy, which is to cut any so-called political campaign.”
The french government argued that the public information message, simply asking people to register to vote, should not count as a “political campaign”.
Twitter’s own guidelines on European political content state that political campaign advertisers should go through a special certification process. Issue advocacy ads not supporting or targeting individual people or parties are generally allowed without restriction.
