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Comment by carl_dr | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone why ELI5 please? The discussion on Twitter isn’t very … analytical.

Twitter's Advertisement teams have been decimated, possibly to the point of non-existence. I've seen online advertisers complaining that their emails / issues are not getting any responses in the past two weeks, despite concerns about advertisements + brands being shown next to pornographic material (which is the fastest growing section of Twitter this year, even before Musk).

While porn has been on the rise on Twitter, the uptick of branding next to pornography is a recent issue. I'm guessing that a lot of those services Mr. Musk turned off in the past two weeks were related to brand-protection that these advertisers cared about.

Its no secret that lots of social media sites have pornography sections. But what brands want is assurances that their advertisements are isolated away from those corners, especially for brands like Kellogg's, Mars, and other brands that want to build a strong brand with children.

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I'm not sure what Volkswagen is worried about: it could be that Volkswagen just doesn't want to give money to Twitter when its obviously going to just be funneled to Elon Musk / TSLA eventually.

Still, the loss of Volkswagen is yet another papercut in this slew of advertisers that have left Twitter.

Thanks, that helps.

Also worth nothing that about 4/5 of the content moderation team were laid off, so anything that involves a human in the loop will be compromised (more ML processes than you might think have a manual review phase).

Furthermore, Brand Safety is a standard requirement for ALL serious advertisers. They have lists of topics and keywords to avoid, and if you can’t ensure that (or at least send a rep to apologize and fix it when the prevention mechanism is imperfect), they won’t run with you.

This isn’t new or complicated. The only person who doesn’t seem to understand it is Musk.

Musk hasn't needed to understand that, ever. Every one of the companies he doesn't do actual work for he could just spare a small loan of a billion emerald dollars and be fine. He could do the same with twitter but i think he wants it to fail because he never intended on actually going through with the purchase and just wanted to pump and dump the stock.

Yes, also anyone spending money with a company and can afford not to, expects to be treated like a king. They expect a real person to pick up the phone and kiss their ass.

The pornographic content became noticeable for me at some point in the summer. It was strange, almost all in Spanish and with no clear connection to the 4ish subjects I followed on twitter with that account. That account ran its course otherwise I'd go back on and check if that is still happening.

In general I wonder what levers get connected to ad targeting. Several years ago I started to get substantial personalized ads in Spanish somewhere else (maybe youtube?) after a year it went back to English. I also had an account that had a 50-50 mix of German and English for a while.

1) Why enrich the CEO of a competitor car company?

2) Why do business with a company whose CEO makes public posts like a 9-year-old edgelord?

3) Why even bother? Twitter can't have been more than 1% of VW's ad budget.

Amoungst other things, Twitter is now far less willing to deal with hate speech. Brands hardly want to be seen near that type of content.

It’s a toxic (racist/sexist) place now I assume.

I can assure you, it's exactly like it was before, the rules of engagement weren't changed. The only thing I notice is that there is more activity now.

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