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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is not a profitable company and Elon must turn it into one. So, bluntly, what positive impact was that team making to the bottom line?

Some may be tempted to look for political meaning behind this decision but this is a business and I think there is no need to look beyond hard-fact business calculations here.

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Have you seen what's been happening in Ethiopia for the last few years? Or elsewhere? The stakes are much higher than the bottom line. These platforms have been used to for coordinated campaigns to instigate and stoke mass interpersonal violence. The Human Rights team responded to that vulnerability.

Sounds like they weren't doing a very good job then.

Yeah but how does that need a separated team? Nobody wants to advertise Coca-Cola next to pictures of human right abuse anyway

That you can't see the value in having such a team - that having such a team is essential for a company like twitter to operate - is completely baffling to me. Not having one will make advertisers pull out and make the company much less profitable.

Frankly, I don't see how having a team that works "to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia," makes any difference to advertisers (but honestly I don't quite get what the team was doing concretely within Twitter... well, maybe Elon didn't, either!)

Advertisers can be spooked by the contents of tweets. Basically few brands want to be associated with extremist or otherwise 'damaging' contents but that's very different and rather touches moderation. That's why advertisers are currently cautious, not because of Human Rights (capitalised) in global conflicts...

I think advertises might get spooked by twitter facilitating a genocide.

edit: You mentioned Ethopia -- https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/16/ethiopias-invisible-ethn...

How is twitter facilitating a genocide. The article makes no mention of it.

They’re not, that’s what they had someone working to prevent!

What exactly was prevented?

> twitter facilitating a genocide.

Where twitter employees on the ground training and supplying death squads, helping them hunt down X group.

How does a social media site facilitate genocide?

The same way traditional media does?

c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...

Are you trolling?

Yeah but that could be part of be normal. Moderation team

I’m sure it helped keep advertisers on the platform, given that it contributes to brand safety.

Your conclusion does not follow. More accurate and likely is that the brands will now feel free to no longer be extorted on Twitter by the whole NGO shaming and naming blackmail/guilt tripping industry. The only things these groups and people are ever successful at is lining their pockets, employing friends and family, expanding their extortion racket, and flying around speaking of how virtuous they are. I know them and live among them. It’s nauseating and clearly psychopathic.

But maybe I’m wrong, did this Twitter human rights team (why?) speak out about the human trafficking of immigration? And its sex trade/trafficking? Did it speak out against the violation of the human rights of the indigenous people who are inundated by immigration and are being plundered by it? Did they speak out against the decimation of emigrant communities that are emptied out and decimated? Did they call for stopping the use of tech products or electric vehicles that are built on slavery mining of rare earth minerals? Did this human rights team speak out against the political prisoner incarceration and clear human rights abuses of trump supporters? Did they speak for the rights and against the US and UK governments’ atrocity against Julian Assange? … and did they do any of that without simply receiving money/access/image and then claim their “partners” are working to improve?

I look forward to someone providing me some insight. Last I heard Twitter was still a hotbed of sex trafficking and sexual slavery, and its associated pornography. Pedophiles are constantly (just the other day) caught/exposed by use of Twitter.

Elon Musk has now taken several steps that make advertisers nervous (this step one included). As such, by his own admission, Twitter is now suffering a massive fall in revenue. Therefore, such cuts are the very definition of "penny wise, pound foolish." A few more cuts like this and Twitter will go the way of Tumblr (bought for $1.1 billion and sold for $3 million). If your whole business model is advertising then you need to care about the audience that you hope to sell to your advertisers, and if you don't care about that audience, it will shrink, at which point your advertising revenue will decline.

If Twitter’s business model had been advertisement, Twitter would not have banned people with money to spend.

What exactly do you believe their business model to be?

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