Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

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Here's some good background: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/elon-musk-twitter... (archive: https://archive.ph/IZp4P)

Elon himself said that Twitter "cannot become a free-for-all hellscape", and so advertisers want to understand exactly what the plan is to avoid that given that (for example) Elon laid off 75% of the moderation team.

Pre-Elon, leadership spent lots of cycles building trust and confidence with advertisers, involving them in policy discussions, etc. That is not only no longer happening, but it appears that Elon is blocking people who are asking tough questions.

https://twitter.com/loupas/status/1588599808587345921

For anyone confused about motivations, this isn't about "wokeism" but is straight capitalism. In the same way that airlines don't want their ads to be placed next to coverage of an air disaster, advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content.

"Elon laid off 75% of the moderation team."

Did he?

According to this BBC article[1], "Yoel Roth, Twitter's Head of Safety & Integrity, said that most of the more than 2,000 content moderators working on "front-line review" were not impacted" by the firings.

More details here[2], where Roth says "More than 80% of our incoming content moderation volume was completely unaffected by this access change. The daily volume of moderation actions we take stayed steady through this period."

[1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63524219

[2] - https://nitter.net/yoyoel/status/1588657229628321792

Wait. So of the ~3500 employees left at the company, 2000 are content moderators?!

I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of them aren't Twitter employees, but subcontractors somewhere. At least that's what plenty other social media sites do.

Well yeah, what else about Twitter would require that much raw manpower?

Ad sales, advertising relationship management, ad analytics for those relationships.

Isn't content moderation the biggest challenge at Twitter?

We've created a new class, of tens of thousands of people all over the world, who spend all day censoring content in realtime.

Eventually there will be giant censorship service corporations lobbying government for more restrictions on speech, and for them to be more complicated and confusing (to make them more difficult to in-house.)

No, we’ve created a class of global citizens whose only job is to handle, without protection, the torrent of psychological toxic waste we create every single second of the day. The vast majority of the work they do is to act as an ablative shield for all the horrors humanity can pour into the internet, and they do it for a fraction of the remuneration of a single social media company SWE, even when they’re onshored. What the rest of us see as “censorship” is the tip of the iceberg — the stuff that isn’t so horrid as to get weeded out immediately and so ends up in the “user-initiated moderation” category. Everything below that, if we weren’t destroying people’s minds and emotional well-being for outsourced pennies on the hour, would make the Internet so radioactive for every single user that an open WiFi point would be considered a crime against humanity.

it's outsourced to Infosys or TCS

Accenture, actually.

I assume we'll know final numbers once the dust settles, but that sounds not nearly as bad as assumed.

However, my personal experience of Twitter suggests that it remains an open air sewer, which tends to indicate that the content moderation team was already severely under-staffed. I suspect that it's even more true for non-English language.

So, even if only 15% of the content moderators have been laid off, this doesn't bode well for the future health of conversations on the platform.

Regardless, thanks for the sources!

update: Reading through the source once again, 15% of the T&S team was laid off but we don't have numbers for the number of content moderators who were laid off. I had assumed that content moderators were part of the T&S team, but that may not be true.

> which tends to indicate that the content moderation team was already severely under-staffed

Or that they were moderating the wrong thing.

Good point.

Twitter was an open air sewer for me until I learned to love the block/use feature. Now it’s all good.

I’m pretty sure Twitter deprioritizes tweets from accounts similar to ones you’ve blocked.

> In the same way that airlines don't want their ads to be placed next to coverage of an air disaster, advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content.

Yep. How many major companies do you recall advertising on 4chan?

That question was discussed on 4chan itself recently. I believe the suggestion was that twitter will be saved by onahole retailers and pirate anime streams. There's also that one guy that buys ads for his own Spotify playlist. That certainly won't sustain twitter but it's a humorous future to think about for the org.

If they can deliver a profitable DR platform they'll be fine. Sounds like they haven't done that yet though, if the upfronts are this big a deal.

> advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content.

The underlying assumption is that slackivists will actually put their money where their mouth is. The Chick-fil-A boycotts did absolutely nothing to their sales and I suspect the same would be true for any company that people call out for advertising on Twitter. I seriously doubt that there are very many consumers will genuinely care where a company allocates its advertising dollars.

I'm actually politically left, but the reason I care is that I hope that this forces the left to actually act outside of being angry on the internet. As much as I disagree with conservatives, I have to applaud that they actually take meaningful political action (e.g. volunteer as poll watchers because they believe in election fraud).

I don't think you understand. This has nothing to do with activists. Companies already did not want to advertise on controversial content 40 years ago. You don't see Rolex advertising on The Sun (and no, it's not only about demographics, plenty of upper class people read tabloids).

Brand image is extremely important. You most definitely do not want most brands appearing close to shitty content.

You have the same thing with physical advertising where brands will refuse their ads in some places if the perception of the space is too bad (ex: homeless people around, drug traffic...). The reason is that even if you might be interested with the brand you will now associate it with the environment you were presented it with.

Of course for Lidl it is less of a worry, but even low price brands have standards and don't want to be anywhere near a nazy content.

Hmmm, wonder if it’s a freedom of speech issue if a coalition of companies effectively prevent public discussion of issues that might significantly upset the status quo?

Loud, blatant lies that are repeated by authority figures continuously is one thing. That this is bad is almost universally agreed on. But does this advertiser worry really stop at that?

I think this is a very interesting question, hitting at the heart of the Twitter controversy. Advertisers have an incredibly strong influence on contemporary discourse; their concerns influence almost all publicly-visible discussion, opinion and debate. The attention economy, eyeball-and-click-hunting is just the tip of the spear, and this dominates almost every public communication platform in the world.

Elon Musk and his $44 billion «fuck this shit» purchase is the only significant challenge to this model. It will obviously upset the advertisers; it’s tautological.

Maybe the result is that it won’t work, but if it does, Twitter will be the only public communications platform that isn’t very heavily influenced by advertisers’ interests.

He who pays the fiddler, calls the tune. Want to broadcast whatever you want? Fine, pay for it. Want advertisers to subsidize your costs? Don't be surprised that their money comes with strings attached.

Judging by the downvotes, I don't think I'm getting my point across.

Absolutely every fiddler that currently has an audience of non-negligible size is paid by a consortium of advertisers that have aligning interests. The strings, so to speak, all pull in the same direction. This is largely invisible, since everyone must play by these rules. TV, newspapers, social media. Audience of 5 billion. We do complain about polarization, clickbait, negative emotion amplification and dark patterns a lot, but we accept it as the economic laws of gravity. Shareholder duty cements this. It molds our entire society.

Elon Musk has removed Twitter from this regime, by burning 20 billion dollars and stating a willingness to burn the remaining 24. Assuming he can make the economics work out, Twitter will be the only global media platform that doesn't have to bow to the advertisers' every whim.

A lot of the contention comes from the fact that if this succeeds, Twitter will no longer have to follow the moderation- and censorship rules that advertisers have quietly implemented everywhere else. This might apply to the extremes that the majority want to censor (whether sensibly or not), but it also applies to lots of discourse that vocal minorities wants to censor.

Regardless of whether one likes this development, it's super interesting.

Remind me again, which major brands advertise on 4chan?

> I don't think I'm getting my point across.

Alternate proposal: you got your point across and people disagree with you.

Any ideas for how he's going to keep the lights on at twitter? Your suggestion that advertisers fleeing the platform is a "free speech issue" is highly questionable. What remedy would you propose? Forcing advertisers to spend, and how much should the government force them to spend, propping up political speech they disagree with?

Boycotts are protected speech. Even if you find that speech deplorable.

I still think you didn't get my point, since you seem to be arguing a point I didn't make :)

I'll boil it down to just a couple of sentences: It's a democratic problem that 99% of all public discourse is subject to veto and policy from advertisers and payment processers, and the drive to maximize income from these. Even if you disagree on everything else, at least the consequent polarization should be bad enough to concede this point.

Solution? Well, obviously the advertisers are free to do what they want, but that doesn't make their pervasive influence any smaller. A problem doesn't disappear just because solutions are elusive.

My guess is that Musk wins the battle of the wills here; he no longer needs to maximize advertiser income, just get enough to make the wheels turn. I wouldn't bet the farm on him resolving the issues I've highlighted; he's far too mercurial to have any confidence on that. But he does have a shot, as opposed to everyone else.

>It's a democratic problem that 99% of all public discourse is subject to veto and policy from advertisers and payment processers

In the sense we don't want to fund actual public places for discourse online and instead have pushed this off to private servers ran by private companies, yes. When a large portion of the voter base says "reduce taxes beyond all else" don't expect funding to show up for this. More so the advertising industries are also apt to fund political campaigns so it's unlikely most politicians are going to go out of the way to change status quo. And in that sense the average user is going to be aligned with providing most online interactions as 'somewhat' safe spaces until safety is not aligned with their political sensibilities.

I personally don't think that Elon is going to do much other than crash the value of Twitter and lose and epic amount of cash doing so. It's possible that the whole ordeal may push more people to federated social media, but it seems to unlikely to do so in numbers that matter.

A service equivalent to Twitter does not cost billions per year to run. In principle, you could boot one up with pocket change and operate it with a small budget. The reason you can't do this in practice is that the network effects are a fundamental requirement, almost impossible to recreate, and all the established operators are forced by shareholder duty to play the adtech game.

If you were an effective altruist worried about adtech's pervasive influence on society and had unlimited funds, you could hardly do better than purchasing one of the few established, global social networks. Trim down its cost structure to the bare minimum, make the economics work without letting the global-reach advertisers dictate terms, preserve the network effects that comprise the real value of your media channel and then shape the discourse to serve whatever positive outcome the current system prevents. You'll have the only privately-owned, global-reach media channel in the whole world that's not fundamentally influenced by advertisers.

Of course, Elon Musk might not be an effective altruist and the billion-dollar interest payment is an impediment to the above plan, I'll grant you that. But hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the guy just ends up subsidising this thing from his other businesses if he can't make it run organically. That's what I would do. It'd be a uniquely independent and influential media channel.

I really don't see why this would make people quit Twitter en masse. The only people quitting Twitter are those who really hate Elon Musk, and there just aren't that many of them. The service works like before and it might well work better, allowing democratic discourse that is viable for a global audience nowhere else.

As I mentioned earlier, the conclusion boils down to whether you think Musk means well or not.

> In principle, you could boot one up with pocket change and operate it with a small budget.

In practice, a site with user generated content from millions of users and a shoestring budget is an unmoderated, spam-laden shithole. Or, you can leave the moderation up to AI which permanently bans people for arbitrary and inscrutable reasons. Neither of these outcomes is appealing to the general public.

Twitter may not cost billions to run, but it's my bet it still costs far more than you expect. Especially when you get to scale and have to avoid things like DDOS and extremely high connection rates and information exchange while retaining low latency. As you say it's the size of the network that makes it important.

If you think advertisers are your biggest problem then I'll have to tell you about governments. Piss off the EU with privacy issues and you'll be fined. Piss off Russia/China you'll be banned. Don't keep some level of control over the violent threats US posters are making and you'll be civilly sued as an accessory.

And you're still going to spend a massive amount of time and effort banning crap if you want any of your user base to hang around, lest you just create the next 4chan (which even does a fair amount of their own banning).

The US is first and foremost a capitalist society. One could attempt to argue your characterization that it's "democratic" but in my opinion, that won't stand in the face of of Burwell vs Hobby Lobby and Citizens United vs FEC.

If you think Musk is going to defeat capitalism to the point that commoners are heard in the town square, unfettered by the wants of advertisers and media conglomerates, I'd say your chances are better praying that his next venture is a moonshot for time travel, destination circa 1600. Or before: one of the first tunes I learned on the violin was an advertising jingle popularized around then.

No, Musk doesn't want the commoner to be heard. He wants his opinion to have center stage. He's certainly not going to undo the grip that capitalism has on the public sphere. He's just another moneyed elite.

> He's just another moneyed elite.

But with a fleet of rockets.

> My guess is that Musk wins the battle of the wills here; he no longer needs to maximize advertiser income, just get enough to make the wheels turn

Twitter now has to pay $1 billion a year in debt servicing costs. Twitter was not wildly profitable before, so it seems very unlikely Musk can make enough money to break even, much less profit, while losing a large portion of advertising revenue.

That's why he's trying cut costs so aggressively, and rushing to gain new subscription revenue.

> I'll boil it down to just a couple of sentences: It's a democratic problem that 99% of all public discourse is subject to veto and policy from advertisers and payment processers, and the drive to maximize income from these.

Yes in the sense that capitalism isn't and will never be a "fair" system as anyone who participates in it may perceive it.

There's a point where any economic system can erode its political cousin whether that be capitalism, socialism, or communism. To me, all you're saying is what others before you have said: we have too much weight in the capitalism category these days. I think most people probably agree with that.

If advertising interferes so much with public discourse, as you say, isn’t it then a good thing that advertisers are withdrawing?

> My guess is that Musk wins the battle of the wills here; he no longer needs to maximize advertiser income, just get enough to make the wheels turn.

Twitter was hardly profitable before, and now it is loaded with more debt than ever. If at all, he needs to sell more ads, not less.

> It's a democratic problem that 99% of all public discourse is subject to veto and policy from advertisers and payment processers, and the drive to maximize income from these.

The problem is in reverse. Cable news and then Twitter artificially created this idea that a public international town square was a good idea and then decided the need to fund it.

Really the Democratic problem is that over the past 30 or so years we’ve flipped the pyramid from focusing on local news and communication to focusing on national and international news and communication. And that is much more expensive to operate.

It is not even boycot for political reason (and conservatives do those all the time). It is literally just conservative cold business decision of "I don't trust that guy". This concept of freedom where others are mandated to do business or not do business or listen someone is super odd.

Advertisers have free speech right to not do business with Twitter. They have right to not do business with me too. Just like Musk has right to fire people from his company.

Free speech means also freedom to criticize twitter or disassociate from it when you think it affects your business.a

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