IBM pauses advertising on X after ads show up next to antisemitic content
theregister.com
theregister.com
This paragraph links to a related piece about CEO Yaccarino's efforts to save the company despite Musk seemingly doing his best to burn it all down:
> Yaccarino is reportedly set to meet with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, British bank Barclays, Japanese banks MUFG and Mizuho, and French financial institutions BNP Paribas and Société Générale to discuss plans not to leave them in the lurch as the value of X's assets have plummeted by two thirds in the past year.
> With huge interest payments to those banks continuing to come due and X's value incredibly unclear - but unlikely to have appreciated - the banks might be getting impatient to see some improvement as Musk's first year of ownership draws to a close.
I'm very curious to see what happens when X ends up defaulting on these obligations, as it sure looks like it will. Musk didn't seem too concerned about ignoring other contractual obligations, like rent and its AWS bill, nor about paying required severance for laid-off workers, to the tune of $500 million, according to one recent suit.
But I imagine that he can't just skip out on his obligation to the banks without a severe reckoning. Can he?
I'm not sure if they're in a position to actively piss off their banking partners.
The only tech turnaround of this magnitude that has happened in recent memory is Apple. Jobs was a founder and had the RDF going for him and while he might have pissed off a few people.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/s/49BWg0N9Xr
But at least the employees believed in him and he had the Mac faithful as a base.
What does Twitter have?
I think in the tech community and other luminaries, bien-pensants associated groups, we have a tendency to really exaggerate and delude ourselves into believing what we want to be true in the social world. We dislike person A/idea A so we're convinced anything that has to do with it will fail or has to be some sort of negative spin.
In reality I think the average person on this planet is a lot more pragmatic and doesn't necessarily care anywhere as much as loud people do.
Yahoo was one of the most trafficked sites for decades and couldn’t monetize their traffic.
And the average person is not using Twitter. There are only 350 million active users worldwide compared to 3 billion Facebook users. Even PInterest has more users
https://www.searchlogistics.com/learn/statistics/tiktok-user...
And Twitter will never be “the everything app” in the US. Apple and Google will never let it and the only reason that worked in other countries is a combination of path dependencies and phones in China are not running “Google Android” and Apple doesn’t have a choice but to be more lax about its App Store policies in China or users of the “everything apps” will revolt.
While I’ll give Musk credit for doing what almost no one in the last 20 years has done - create successful hardwarw/tech companies. He’s shown no ability to run a software business.
And the immovable object is Apple. You can’t be the “everything app” without running head first into the App Store restrictions.
That’s like with all of the big talk that Apple does about App Store rules, they’ve let Uber and Facebook get away with things that no smaller developer could.
No one is going to stop buying an iPhone in the US because of Twitter.
If you default on your bonds, your creditors can just force you into bankruptcy. In the context of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company would have to propose a reorganization plan that was acceptable to the creditors.
One could imagine a debt-to-equity conversion during which Musk's holdings would effectively become worthless and the banks would end up owning the business. If the bondholders conclude that the business has value, but less if Musk keeps calling the shots, one can imagine an outcome like that.
At that point, best case is probably that you'd try to put a turnaround management team in place with a view to taking it public again.
Do you really think Elon would give up control of Twitter that easily?
In contrast, Instagram Reels are annoying; even after reporting certain content, the same or similar Reels reappear. We don't even need to discuss TikTok. From my perspective, it tends to have far more hateful content.
By modern “conservatives”, I’m not talking about the Reagan/Bush/McCain/Romney type of conservative who are now out of favor by the Republican Party.
That pissed off ... some company... and apparently Twitter promised tools to help prevent this in the future.
Those tools have been breaking this year. An advertisement's ability to generate good-will to the company is entirely dependent on context. Airplane advertisements (ie: Fly with Southwest) mean completely different things when they're next to airplane crashing news.
-----------------------------
Simple rules like "If you have news about an airplane crash or other such disaster, please skip my advertisement until the next cycle" are a thing in traditional media. Especially for the high-paying industries. They expect an advertising partner to help control the context in which their advertisements are shown.
EDIT: Another example is Micky Mouse or Tony the Tiger (and other such mascots) showing up next to Twitter Furry-porn. There's plenty of reasons for a company to try to control the context. In the case of furry-porn, its all legal (though uncomfortable), but it really makes animal-based mascots shown in a grossly different light and is terrible for messaging.
The amount of trouble necessary for an advertiser to put most of their dollars somewhere else is vanishingly small. They don't need much of an excuse.
I'd be surprised if Twitter were a top-10 website for advertising. Last time I was looking at Twitter's advertising revenue, they were far smaller than I expected.
That's obviously the intent, but you’d need a lot of paying subscribers to replace the ad revenue they’ve lost, even without the additional debt from the acquisition.
There's no realistic way it works.
This is ... not entirely reassuring.
More yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38297685
Maybe IBM is just the Nazis' preferred brand? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust?wprov=sf...
Second I think that people re-tweeting elon sightly antisemitic tweet to have it show regularly (and thus close to advertising content) is funny and fair trolling. I would do it too if I bother connecting to my account sometimes (Nitter is better for me rn)