Twitter relaxes pot ad rules to lure in more advertisers

Twitter, under the 420-friendly ownership of Elon Musk, became the first social media platform to allow cannabis advertising earlier this year. The platform has now relaxed those rules to attract more advertisers from states in the U.S. where marijuana is legal.

Twitter announced in an announcement on its website that certified advertisers will be able to use packaged cannabis products as part of their ad campaigns. Prior to this, cannabis advertisers were not allowed to show their products or promote their sale in their ads.

Twitter stated that 'They can continue to link responsibly to their own and operated web sites and ecommerce experiences, for CBD, THC and cannabis-related services and products.

Tesla's billionaire CEO was forced to cut costs and scramble for new revenue sources to justify the $44 billion purchase Twitter. In January, the platform lifted a ban on political ads.

Companies who want to advertise cannabis products on Twitter are still required to comply with the rules.

Long list of rules

Twitter must license and pre-authorize them, they can only target the jurisdictions in which they have a license and cannot target anyone younger than 21.

Google, Facebook's parent company Meta and other tech giants all prohibit marijuana ads. Google

Does allow advertising for FDA-approved CBD

California, Colorado and Puerto Rico allow hemp-derived CBD topicals with a THC level of less than 0.3%, but marijuana is still illegal.

Musk's association with marijuana use in 2018 was widely reported.

Tweet

Musk said he was considering a Tesla buyout for $420 a share, a price widely believed to be linked to the time of the afternoon on April 20, when cannabis users celebrate by taking the drug. Musk tweeted shortly after the August 2018 tweet.

Smoked a marijuana joint

On a podcast, Joe Rogan.

Musk, in a trial that centered around whether Musk's tweet about his buyout offer misled Tesla shareholders, testified that the price he offered was not meant to be an allusion to marijuana while admitting why people may have thought it was.

"There's some karma, I believe, around 420." Musk asked on the witness stand if he should be questioning whether this is bad or good karma.

It was long unclear where the term "420" came from. Some people claimed that the term referred to an official police code for marijuana possession, or that it was derived from a Bob Dylan tune.

A consensus has emerged, however, that the movement began in California during the 1970s with a group high school students. The story goes that marijuana was illegal in California at the time. A friend's brother, who was growing cannabis in the woods of Point Reyes north of San Francisco was worried about getting caught, so he made a map for the teens and allowed them to harvest it.

The group met up in the fall of 1971 at 4:20 pm, after football practice and classes, to smoke a joint before heading out to look for the weed patch. The group never found the weed patch, but it stuck.

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Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer, contributed to this article.