Advertiser exodus expected to deeply impact X ad revenue, analysis indicates | Hacker News Reader

Advertiser exodus expected to deeply impact X ad revenue, analysis indicates

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Seems the free market is doing it's job, but I assume Musk will of course see it differently and start suing right, left, and center.

What even is the legal case that he could be making?

I mean, there's his Media Matters lawsuit for one: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/18/elon-musk...

It's not a lawsuit until he files it.

It's just random words from the Twitter king for now. I think that it will be a difficult case and that the Lawyers will shy away from trying to go through with that insanity.

Legal threats from a non-lawyer have very, very low risk. People only pay attention when an actual lawyer is involved.

Here's the now filed lawsuit:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24172809-x-v-media-m...

And he has a very strong case it seems.

On what grounds?

What lawsuit? All I see is a scared CEO flapping his lips about using the legal system to chill the free speech of a group he does not like for calling out his Naziesque rhetoric. It is now well past "The split second court opens on Monday," and yet, no lawsuit. It's almost like he doesn't actually have a case.

Here's the lawsuit:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24172809-x-v-media-m...

Ah yes, hours after the comment and much later than the moment the courts open.

This reads like a petulant press release and nor an actual legal document. It feels like they even stipulate that Media Matters was right and they did display ads next to Nazi propaganda, but Musk is getting huffy about the technique MM used to expose this flaw in their system.

Side note: how long did it take you to replay to just about every thread in this article with a link to Musk's temper tantrum?

When you can provide a court and a docket number for that lawsuit, we can treat it a real thing that exists rather than empty threat that doesn't because it would have no merit and probably also subject Musk to penalties under the applicable anti-SLAPP laws.

He filed it in Texas, possibly to avoid anti-SLAPP laws.

It doesn't look like The "thermonuclear lawsuit" he was going to launch the "split second court opens", has happened.

/S/

I am shocked, shocked I say. Musk usually seems so cool headed and not prone to constantly spewing hyperbole and bullshit.

Lawsuit here https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24172809-x-v-media-m...

Well shut my mouth, I thought it was a bluff.

Thanks for the link.

ps. this isn't sarcasm.

There isn't one. Truth is a defense to defamation in the USA. Media Matters can call Musk an anti-Semite and say Twitter pays Nazis to write propaganda and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them, because both of those things are true.

That is true, however Musk's suit is likely even more difficult to prove than that. It's not good enough that it be provably false (and the law puts a heavy emphasis on the word provably there).

For a public figure suing anyone over claims like this, he would need to prove "actual malice" which typically means that not only was it provably false, but that the entity making the claim KNEW it was false, and decided to say it anyway.

So Musk will likely have to prove that Media Matters article was a matter of fact (and not an opinion), prove that the fact they claimed was false, and prove that they knew it was false before publishing it.

That's a VERY high bar.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If the ad displays are worthwhile then advertisers will be drawn to use X regardless of the audience or what their ads are displayed next to. There is a porn shop in my city with a Coca-Cola billboard above it because it's on the most major thoroughfare.

Probably true in direct response marketing, possibly unknowable in brand marketing.

That’s not a valid analogy: everyone knows that the billboard is separate from the shop renting the space below and Coca Cola doesn’t pay the porn shop to drive traffic to their ad. Twitter has revenue sharing and also uses that revenue to provide free services so there’s no way for an advertiser to avoid their money benefitting the extremist groups who use the service. Coca Cola paying for the billboard on the roof doesn’t mean the porn shop isn’t paying rent.

The porn shop is also unlikely to have anything on the front of their shops which is even remotely comparable to the tweets causing advertisers to leave. For all that religious nuts go on about it, porn is mainstream even in conservative areas and the ads will talk about pleasing your wife, not harming anyone. If they put up ads talking about how mixed-race sex should be punished or saying that women should be assaulted, the comparison would hold up more - and so would the reaction as they lost their business permits and lease.

Has he ever actually sued any of the people he's threatened? This is not the first time he's thrown around a lot of bluster with nothing to show for it

Yes: he's filed suit against the "Center for Countering Digital Hate", also for publicly criticizing the way he runs Twitter.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/01/free-speech-absolutist-e...

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41... (plaintiff's complaint)

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41... (defendant's anti-SLAPP motion)

He's an absolutist in his belief that he should be free to sue anyone whose speech about him he does not like.

It would be nice if others start counter-suing him personally and not his companies. Don’t make the employees suffer for his tactics.

Did he also ever take legal action after the supposed stalker incident which was claimed to be a result of the jet tracker?

In this specific round of bluster, he has filed suit against Media Matters.

sounds more like a cartel than a "free market"

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4312813-elon-musk-facing-...

When your owner reads the tweet " “I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”"

and replies with, "You have said the actual truth." (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1724908287471272299)

then your company has a problem if they seek to be an attractive platform for advertising. Most people understand and recognize troll behavior, and the frantic excuse making trolls make when they're exposed. The people that engage in this sort of behavior hate facing accountability for it, and make ridiculous excuses for it when caught.

X has become what the owner wanted it to be, but that is just incompatible with what advertisers want to be associated with their brands. They have just made deliberate product decisions that appeal to a smaller - by dollar value, at least - target market.

Can someone explain what is the anti semitism here? The article says it is anti semitic because "The claim echoes false conspiracy theories that say Jews want to flood the country with minorities." But whats the conspiracy? Whats the theory? Its not a secret at all that western jewish people skew to the left and its also not a secret that left wingers are very much in favor of immigration of minorities. Is using the word "flood" anti semitic? Or "horde" ?

Is it homophobic to point out that "Gays for Palestine" want to import people who would like to throw them off roofs? Is it misogynistic to point out that feminists want to import people that would force them to wear beekeepers outfits all day?

It's a white supremacist conspiracy theory called the great replacement. He's implying that the Jews are responsible for trying to bring in immigrants in order to dilute and destroy "the white race". He's also using somewhat oblique language in order to appeal to the right people who understand this crap, like Elon apparently.

Is immigration the conspiracy?

Is the objectionable part entirely in the unwritten subtext you are adding?

Anyone can search for "Great Replacement Theory", which you'll frequently hear radicalized people refer to "White Genocide".

Whether or not you believe in this, it was cited directly in the manifestos of

* the Christchurch NZ shooter (https://www.start.umd.edu/news/new-zealand-terrorists-manife..., 51 dead, 40 injured)

* the El Paso shooter (https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/the-manifesto-of-the-..., 23 dead, 22 injured)

* the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/10/28/analyzing-ter..., 11 dead, 6 injured)

* the Buffalo shooter (https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/buffaloshooting-online..., 10 dead, 3 injured)

It is why the neonazis that marched in the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville VA 6 years ago chanted "You will not replace us. Jews will not replace us" and "Blood and Soil" (Blut und Boden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil)

This is widely known and barely coded language. It is prominently supported and spread by people that X's owner had replied to retweeted previously, and repeatedly. This widely known, widely understood context informs the real meaning of this tweet.

When you say it is widely known, do you mean by a majority of the population, 10%, 1%, or 0.1%. Most of this seems very niche to me.

Do you think there is any legitimate way to criticize racial hypocrisy of zionist organizations supporting a racial ethnostate?

For what it is worth, I don't believe in any replacement conspiracy, especially not one carried out by a specific ethnic group.

I have however seen groups like the ADL quickly characterize any opposition as racist. For example, they consider those that participate in BDS and refuse to purchase Israeli goods in their personal lives racist and support anti-BDS laws.

It's obvious what you're doing. You probably think you're being subtle, but you're not.

The discussion is not about what % of people know about this (well-documented if you simply do a google search) conspiracy theory, nor is it about criticizing Israel.

The point is about Elon Musk agreeing with a known white supremacist conspiracy theory.

If you see conspiracy theories everywhere I guess it makes sense that you'd accuse me of one too.

I wasn't being evasive and meant everything I said. If a racist says the sky is blue and you agree, does that make you racist? If someone says calling the sky blue is a dog whistle, does that mean you have to call it red?

Are we really operating under the assumption that anyone who criticizes a hypocritical apartheid ethno state is a racist?

There you go again, shoehorning in your carefully constructed talking points, without actually addressing any of the topics of the conversation.

No thanks, if you don't understand the relevance of what I said, this won't go anywhere.

From my perspective "carefully constructed talking points" is having an intelligent and relevant response. From you, anything that challenges you belief is a conspiracy.

How is that challenging? This is not challenging, this is hyper simplistic 8-year-old way of thinking without any nuances. When someone says something obviously over-simplifying with some implication of "us and them" and "this group that I don't like is obviously more stupid/barbaric than me just because they are of a different origin", that does not challenge anything to someone who see more nuances.

If a racist says the sky is blue, I don't say "they are right", I just wait for a non-racist to say the sky is blue, which will happen if the sky is really blue, and then I say this person is right.

If the only people who say the sky is blue are racist, then it is because the sky is not really blue and only racist people will think it's blue, and in this case, when you say they are right, it just means you fall for the same simplifications.

In this case, for example, there is A LOT of people criticizing the policy of Israel government, but they are not doing it in a way that reeks racist ways of thinking (with all the useless implication of "them jews" and "their responsibilities"). And a big majority of the "normal" critics of Israel policies is not called antisemitic by people who mentioned the antisemitism of the commenter Elon's reacted to. If you are unable to understand why, it is more of a you problem than nothing else.

I think that, for me, the red flags are within the reasoning "those people, because they are from those countries, are all a bunch of savages".

It is quite clear that in democratic countries, there is a lot of people who would happily harm the jewish community if they were in position to make that happens, or who would happily throw gays off the roofs if they were in position to make that happens, or who would happily oppress women if they were in position to make that happens.

This idea that immigration is obviously bringing "problematic barbarian people" is the problem: it implies that the commenter truly believes those people to be intrinsically inferior or intrinsically their enemy. This is especially stupid when such commenters end up explaining their political ideals in which there is as much barbaric treatment for people they don't like.

This apparent contradiction disappears when you really understand the logic: the person is not against racism, the person is against racism toward them, but has nothing against racism when it's against people they don't like. The question is not about moral or justice, it is about the fight of two identical mentality, each one group hating the other group, saying "I will do fundamentally the same things as them, but I'm better than them because my group is better and their group sucks".

Didn't the anti israel/pro hamas demonstrations all across western europe kinda give merit to that statement. A lot of the people there were recent (1-2 generation) migrants into Europe.

Or what is happening in US academia?

No, since the premise is invalid. There is not a Jewish conspiracy to increase US immigration in the first place. Since the premise is false, all the points build upon that are meaningless.

It's a fairly basic attempt to divide people, is all. It works on impressionable and less intelligent people. Divided people are easier to control and manipulate.

Yeah but no. Please literally read the text you quoted - there are a lot of prominent Jewish voices that are big in the SJW space - pro immigration etc. The whole nine yards. And suddenly they are surprised when their space erupts with antisemitic fervor not seen since WWII they suddenly act like surprised pikachus. And of course those specific sjw don't deserve a shred of sympathy. Because when the other jews - like the Hassidim and orthodox were paying the price they were virtue signaling.

Been watching the OpenAI drama play out on X for three days now: media sites everywhere embedding X tweets.

I’m still waiting for the site to go down. After Musk laid off 80% of the staff, HN and Reddit were adamant that the infra was far too complex for the remaining employees and a few Tesla/SpaceX engineers to figure out and keep running for more than a few months.

Any day now…

At this point they’ve rewritten nearly everything in rust so that’s unlikely to happen

Carcinisation

I highly doubt they've rewritten even half the code. Of all the places that should know how long and hard "rewrites" are, it should be here, given all the developers.

Depends how the organization is structured.

Rewrites can be cathartic if you are not tasked with reserving every detail or forced to catalog every possible change of every possible alteration

I mean, its outage rate for me has been significantly higher than before, more along the lines of the early days of Twitter when Fail Whales were a running gag. Features randomly breaking for a couple days; timeline not loading; etc.

Twitter's remaining staff is pretty clearly struggling to hold the shebang together.

It did go down, many times. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/technology/twitter-outage...

That’s not really what I, or anyone making the predictions was referring to.

The prevailing sentiment was that the site would basically fail to remain functional and go offline because only incompetent yes-men would work for Elon while anyone with aptitude or experience was gone.

> The prevailing sentiment was that the site

I don't remember that ever being the prevailing sentiment. That was a sentiment by a particular subgroup, but I remember the prevailing sentiment being that Twitter will get even worse than before. Which most people I know think has happened.

Nah, the prevailing sentiment was that there would be more outages and instability, which was true.

I menan, it has had a lot of outages and failures. Most of those fired were not core engineers but people who to the most part were hired to make sure twitter keeps the right external interests such as governments and advertisers happy, let users have a good enough experience to where advertisers will continue to pay twitter and most importantly to scale twitter so that it has the potential to make profit (not just break even), and they succeeded by getting Elon to buy the company. Twitter's shareholders profited. It maybe takes like a dozen people to just keep the site online but to keep users, increase revenue and profit that's why everyone else was there. You pay at most 200k times 7000 people which is around 1.4B in salaries at most (likely much less lol) for a company valued at 48B so it can be a 100B company some day. The whole point of investing is you make more money.

Of course a jerkoff like Elon who inherited his way into profiting from paypal and buying the established near market ready Tesla would not understand that, he us used to letting others run things and taking credit for it, I mean people literally credit him for rocket science (spacex!), he drank his own kool-aid.

If you seriously think that those people he fired served no purpose, I'd like to challenge you: would you buy a private twitter share now? I mean you'd have to be pretty bad at investing to do so right?

Elon's whole schtick is that he can't get people to like him even with all his money and he thinks that makes him a victim. He hasn't figured out what most normal adults figure out in roughly their 20's: no one owes you affection, nothing you own or do entitles you to someone else's affection. He sought to remedy this by expelling all who disagree with him and rallying his fans around him.

Truly sad, he could have literally built a city or an island full of his admirers if he wanted. He lost all that money over twitter loudmouths. I think he has the official record of the person who lost the most amount of money in the shortest time in the history of humanity!

How could you possibly know the KPIs and profitability of twitter at this moment? Especially since I assume you only consume anti-twitter content? None of us would buy a twitter share right now because we don’t have enough data to do so…

We are literally in a thread taking about their only meaningful revenue source collapsing to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

I’m saying we don’t have first-hand sources for revenue, nor do we have first-hand sources for expenses, which we know to some degree have both declined.

Even Elon said just 3 weeks ago that it had lost more than half its value. Why are you so insistent on clinging to such a poor argument here?

You don’t need some independent GAAP compliant audit to see that things were going exceptionally poorly before they lost the majority of their only meaningful revenue stream and that no sane person would start investing in it at this point.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938969/x-twitter-valua...

Elon himself has stated a 50% loss of value since he purchased it, of course he did blame others for the loss.

That has nothing to do with advertisers not wanting their ads next to hate speech and nazi commentary.

Completely manufactured by the media.

What is manufactured? That advertised don't want their ads next to hate speech, the hate speech itself, or the fact that ads are appearing next to the hate speech?

He describes, in detail, the method where it was "manufactured" by the activist group MediaMatters here:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725771191644758037/phot...

I absolutely love that he screnshotted a word processor which highlights vague claims he's making with dashed-underlines. But what's with the double-underline of "speech"?

I don't get the dude, at all. He's weird, and impulsive. And makes mistakes that I would never make, and yet he leads teams that build things that other teams led by other brilliant people failed to build before.

I will never understand it.

I just know that in my past-life working with Air Force space command they all laughed at him when he first said he was going to have vertically landing rockets with SpaceX. The execs at GM who cancelled the EV1 all laughed at him with Tesla. Everyone on here was positive that Twitter would crash under its own weight when he nuked 80% of the staff.

I've been a daily user of Twitter since 2008.

It's glitchy from time to time, and I notice lags on my notifications. And yet it also hosts video, has a bunch of new features that I mostly like, and the "Spaces" functionality is actually pretty damned good after being total garbage when it first launched. From a feature standpoint, it's vastly better than it was before he massively overpaid for it. And yeah, there are nazis on there that weren't there before. I almost never see them, but when I do, I mute them.

So basically, it's like how the internet had always been. The nazis suck, but they're a cost I pay to not have posts like "The bat-borne coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan might have something to do with the bat-borne coronavirus lab in Wuhan" get censored.

>>or the fact that ads are appearing next to the hate speech?

This part is manufactured. Have you never been on facebook tiktok instagram or any other ad saturated SV invention?

think a bit beyond the media and the associated lies man. nick you must be at least somewhat intelligent if you're hanging out here, think.

Elon Musk is the media. You've just chosen a specific side and planted your banner.

It’s wild watching people like the one you were responding to talk down to others as though they were correcting a child with so much confidence while simultaneously having zero self reflection and just hiding behind this vague smoke and mirrors conspiracy nonsense. It’s completely indistinguishable from random qanon ramblings.

I'm sorry... I am not intelligent because I believe in the factual truth? There are screenshots of the ads next to content, and X confirms they are real in their lawsuit filing.

>>I am not intelligent because I believe in the factual truth?

Reread what I said or prove me wrong, or do both at once.

>>There are screenshots of the ads next to content,

manufactured evidence, why dont you read tfa? Slam dunk, MM is going down.

The screenshots are real. The content was served by X to MM as stated. Every test known to man would be "manufactured" by X's definition.

I suppose Musk is the "the media" these days, so yes, his racist outbursts are manufactured by the media.

What part of it is manufactured? That his mask came off, and revealed a full-on reptile underneath, that's retweeting replacement theory?

You don't think that there's a problem with the richest industrialist and media mogul in the world actively broadcasting that there's a vast, global Jewish conspiracy to replace whitey?

This isn't, like, criticism of a political viewpoint! If he's going to believe in crazy things, the guy should stick to grassy knolls and flat earth and faked moon landings, or literally anything that's not 'The jews are out to get us'.

Yeah X proves that it's still the single best source for breaking news and still the public town square.

Honestly I hope Elon holds a grudge and remembers that companies performatively pulling ads from the platform right now and charges them a premium when they eventually come back.

Embedded tweets don't have ads or replies. News sites continue to use this mechanism for a curated window into the site. If anything, the continued use of embedded tweets would appear to fly in the face of claims of an anti-twitter cabal of MSM.

Embedded tweets don't have ads... yet.

This was explored at least once by Twitter under Dick Costolo. Pretty quickly abandoned. Turns out media sites don’t want to embed other ads from other platforms on their site.

Embedded youtube videos have, so I can see the xeets having ads.

I don't see embedded Tweets as my browser asks to accept their Cookie to view it.

It might now show ads (yet) but the act of embedding allows tracking of the user which is of value to advertisers.

That's been a real problem for me, since I can't see embedded tweets and won't follow links going to twitter. I wish reporters would just quote the tweet they think is so important that it should be widely read.

So what you're saying is there's gonna be little to no advertising on X? Sounds like a feature to me. Maybe I should join.

The amount of advertising you see will stay the same or potentially even increase (if the big companies are leaving then the amount they make from advertising probably drops, so they have to run more to make up for it), the quality and variety of the companies is what will go down. And if they run out completely the platform just has to shut down altogether.

I you consider that the plan from the start was to destroy Twitter entirely, then everything is going swimmingly. The major hiccup was for Musk to be forced to buy it for much more than it was worth, but other than that, Twitter is pretty much on it's way to being just a hollow husk of its former self.

Twitter is de facto non-profit.

Someone is going to get some cheap adds for end of the year?

Judging by my twitter feed, that someone is a company selling tissue boxes where the tissue makes part of outfit of someone printed on the box.

I dunno what it says about my twitter habits that I get a lot of ads for this tissue box company.

Oh hello, if it’s not the consequences of my own actions.

Good riddance to X.

Why?

This whole issue is completely blown up. No one cares if your ad shows up next to hate speech. It doesn't mean that the advertiser supports that hate speech.

Sort of looks like some people care.

So, Apple, Comcast, Disney, Warner Brothers, IBM, etc are dropping their investments because they do not care?

They should just chill. The issue is that they think that people care. People don't care what ads are shown and where. Ads are targeted to people based on their interests.

Media Matters was being very disingenuous here.

They curated feeds specifically trying to find offensive content and then refresh their feeds until they could find an ad placed near offensive content.

You could pull this trick on any tech company: Google, Facebook, etc. But Media Matters hates Twitter/X and Musk, so they're focused there.

People forget that Media Matters is a political organization, created by a Clinton loyalist, that works closely with a number of super PACs also created by David Brock. They target their political enemies and that's it.

Anyway... these advertisers will be back. This weekend's fiasco about OpenAI proved that there is a need for X -- none of the breaking news was coming from Threads or some random Mastodon server.

I've never understood the "it's not a problem because it's also a problem elsewhere" mindset.

And I'm skeptical of your implication that there is just as much awful content on platforms that at least try to police it as there is on the one that doesn't.

Because it's an isolated demand for rigor and gives away the real game which is "take out the target".

If flipping the partisan lens helps, consider the Hillary Clinton 2016 emails thing. Did anyone really care about the emails? Did we have immaculate email security from 2017-2020?

This seems like a really myopic view, focused on ideas like blame and purity.

Or, another way, this seems like a blame the messenger strategy. Sure, great, Media Matters is not a perfect arbiter of whatever. But how does that make it not a problem that Ford's ads are showing next to overt Nazi content? Am I (or is Ford) supposed to handwave it away because the same thing could happen on another platform?

Recognizing an isolated demand for rigor isn't necessarily a demand for purity.

It's specifically noticing when nobody cares at all about a topic in all contexts except when it gores a particular ox.

In both this example and the emails thing, you never hear anybody talking about it except some very particular cases where they're clearly motivated to tar a particular target.

"We all have to consider this topic to be very important, specifically and only when party X does it, and talking about anything else is whataboutism!"

Henry Ford's Wikipedia page literally has a top-level section on antisemitism.

Henry Ford has been dead for 76 years and the company is not currently run by vocal antisemites, so I don't quite get the point you're trying to make. Presumably you're saying it's not a big deal and they don't really care?

It’s a logical fallacy called “whataboutism”.

> You could pull this trick on any tech company: Google, Facebook, etc.

Part of Musk's response included stating that pro-Hitler posts are allowed on X. Does Facebook allow pro-Hitler posts?

Facebook allows far worse, especially if it isn't in English.

Late edit: I meant "far worse" in this context to be far worse than merely supporting neo nazis, not far worse than Twitter/X. Both have lots of nastiness.

Do they allow open Nazism despite efforts to remove it, or as an explicit policy to allow it?

Does Zuck wade into such conversations to voice his approval?

Facebook notoriously doesn't employ native speakers for all the languages the interface supports, so posts in languages they don't staff for have zero oversight.

Okay. Failure to enforce a policy. Still deplorable, but not the same as an open embrace.

Also, back to topic: does FB show (e.g.) Disney ads on posts in languages it doesn't have moderators for?

In my sibling comment, I do point out some sources for English language nastiness as well.

They may not explicitly embrace it, but one could argue their erratic enforcement of the vague "community standards" is itself insufficient, if not simple lip service.

It's a mixed bag. Their official stance is to take down hateful content, but they don't hold themselves to their own standards very well.

The short version is they have a set of "community standards" (borrowed from, but different to, the legal concept of the same term) that are erratically enforced.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/16/facebook-algor...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2020/05/22/on-facebo...

Just a reminder they tried the same political hit on Elon at this exact time last year. This is pure party politics. They see him as a threat to their power.

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/11/17/clinton-linked-dark-mo...

I didn't even consider Media Matter's interests here, Twitter generally would be a threat to their power and this is just fuel for their fire.

This is what they were created to do. Their founder has created several Super PACs and has been an advisor for the Clintons. Their largest donor was George Soros. They are political in nature and always have been.

That's fine, but people should know what Media Matters is and not confuse them for some non-partisan non-profit.

Then there is this gem, also a stunt pulled by their founder:

> And a nonprofit group founded by the Democratic activist David Brock, which people familiar with the arrangements say secretly spent $200,000 on an unsuccessful effort to bring forward accusations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Trump before Election Day, is considering creating a fund to encourage victims to bring forward similar claims against Republican politicians.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/us/politics/sexual-harass...

Blog post without any sources that don't link back to the same blog.

Fake news.

> They curated feeds specifically trying to find offensive content and then refresh their feeds until they could find an ad placed near offensive content.

I don't understand what's disingenuous about this? They demonstrated that these ads can be served alonside Nazi posts, didn't they?

What was the exact claim that was disingenuous?

Did they show that offensive posts can be shown next to a brand? Or was it claims to the frequency with which it occurs?

I think it was claims to the frequency.

What would you propose if you were tasked with testing whether the ads are placed next to hateful content or not? Please explain how you would test that paying attention to the test being whether there is ANY such placement at all.

So? Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist. Is this not free speech?

It's only defamation if it's not true. It's completely obvious that the site is absolutely loaded with Nazis and trolls. Seems straightforwardly true to me. Media Matters would not have had to try very hard to cram a feed with that stuff. I don't engage with crap like this and my feed is still loaded with it.

That and Elon has been "reply guying" such material for quite some time. He either agrees with them, isn't reading the stuff he promotes, or is actually that tone deaf.

Musk also claims to be pro-free-enterprise. Doesn't that mean it's fine for companies to decide not to advertise on X if they dislike the content? These are private companies, not governments. They can advertise anywhere they want.

The hypocrisy and double standard is just nuts.

> Musk also claims to be pro-free-enterprise. Doesn't that mean it's fine for companies to decide not to advertise on X if they dislike the content? These are private companies, not governments. They can advertise anywhere they want.

Yeah, the sentiments I'm seeing in this comments section ("they'll be back" / "he should charge even more when they return") are funny in that they're totally disconnected from the current reality of digital advertising: i.e., it's a free market, and ad spend budgets are finite.

If people don't want the space, they won't buy it. If the space is seen as less valuable, the people who do buy it will pay less. Supply and demand, baby!

>It's completely obvious that the site is absolutely loaded with Nazis and trolls.

Twitter feed is fitted to the consumer. Mine is mostly filled with pro Israel stuff and crypto bros turned AI evangelists. The only antisemitism I have seen is retweeted by couple of Jewish intellectuals I follow. And majority of the antisemitism since Oct 7 is of Muslim or left wing accounts. The ones from the proper Nazis is order of magnitude lower.

It's interesting that people who don't use the site at all have such strong opinions on it.

I have an account from 2008. I use it daily. Because I don't follow bigots and Nazis, and don't interact with their content, I don't see bigoted/Nazi stuff EVER.

I primarily see a feed of tech/AI/DevOps stuff, mixed in with pro-Israel posts tossed in with Cheech and Chong gummy ads.

The idea that the typical Twitter user following Taylor Swift and Travis Scott and the Washington Post is going to see Apple ads next to Nazi content in their feed is blantantly artificial and silly.

> People forget that Media Matters is a political organization, created by a Clinton loyalist, that works closely with a number of super PACs also created by David Brock. They target their political enemies and that's it.

Can you complete that thought, I don't understand who the political enemies here are. Are you implying that Musk is basically "the other side", the "political enemy" here, i.e. Republican? Why is pointing out that literal Nazis do their thing on Twitter political in this case?

Media Matters plainly described their methodology.

https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/x-placing-ads-mlb-nfl-a...

>We examined the verified accounts of Lucas Gage, E. Michael Jones, Stew Peters, Andrew Torba, and Way of the World — all of which have at least 50,000 followers and regularly use X to engage in antisemitism. Among the ads appearing on these accounts included those for MLB, the NFL, and the Pittsburgh Steelers. As verified accounts with such large followings, these figures could theoretically receive revenue from those ads under the social platform’s revenue sharing program. (At least one of the accounts has received money through the program.)

They are a political organization and make no secret of that.

https://www.mediamatters.org/about-us

>Media Matters for America is a web-based, not-for-profit, 501 (c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

Everything you claim is a nefarious conspiracy is on their website.

If you think there's no evidence Twitter was cozying up to neo-Nazis, that would make it a strange coincidence that Musk himself turned out to be an anti-Semite...

Anybody remember when all the worst people on twitter were so excited to be able to say the N word after Musk bought it, so much so that people were asking if they could yet?

Musk has the right to hold whatever views he wants. He has the right to enforce said views via whatever mechanisms in Twitter, because it's his. Advertisers in turn have the right to leave if they don't want to be associated with Twitter anymore because of that.

He can sue whoever he wants, his cases will be dead on arrival.

A stated reason for his buying it in the first place was he felt there was a liberal bent to it's moderation and he wanted to change that, and what he failed to recognize or refused to comprehend is that the views of bigots are in fact often filtered from social media not because of a liberal bias in the programmers, moderators, or even leadership, but because bigotry is fucking disgusting and all social media besides Mastadon is beholden to advertisers for the lions share of it's revenue, and advertisers (usually) don't want to be associated with bigotry. And just like any product, when you want to make a social media site that's like other social media but conservative (read: bigoted and unmoderated) you can still get advertisers, but it's InfoWars-type adverts: the gun nut coffee people, dick pills, mobile games and financial scams like reverse mortgages, which are worth significantly less money.

Funny, because the methodology they described doesn't at all line up with what they actually did, described in detail here:

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2023/stand-wit...

"Stand with X" give me a fucking break. This isn't some scrappy little non-profit (ok, bad wording)

Did you read what you posted? All they did was look for neo-Nazi pages and hit "refresh" a few times. That's exactly what Media Matters said in the first place.

But Twitter did serve those ads adjacent to the offensive content. No one seems to be claiming that Media Matters photoshopped the ads. The question boils down to how often it happens. Is Apple OK with half their ads being next to racist crap? A quarter? 10%? 1%? 0.1%?

Media Matters demonstrated that it does happen more than 0%. Looks like it's up to Twitter's advertisers to try the experiment for themselves and see if it breaks their own comfort threshold.

Yes, they "demonstrated" it with this tactic described below:

- *Media Matters’ Research Tactics*: - Created an alternate account to manipulate public and advertiser perception. - Curated posts and ads on the timeline to misinform about ad placement. - Contrived experiences are not platform-specific and could be replicated elsewhere.

- *Ad Serving Instances*: - After curation, they refreshed timelines to find rare instances of ad placement. - Logs showed 13 times more ads served to their account than the median X user.

- *Ad Impressions Data*: - On the day in question, of the 5.5 billion ad impressions on X, less than 50 were served against the content in the Media Matters article.

- *Specific Brand Exposure*: - One brand had an ad run adjacent to a post twice, seen by only two users, including the article's author. - Another brand had two ads run adjacent to two posts three times, seen only by the article's author.

- *Content Policy Evaluation*: - The article highlighted nine posts believed to be inappropriate for X. - Only one of the nine posts violated content policies. - Action was taken on the violating post under the "Freedom of Speech, Not Reach" enforcement approach.

It's unimaginable that any advertisers took their word for it and dropped their Twitter ad budget simply because Media Matters said so. At the most, Media Matters might have called their attention to it (if it wasn't already on the advertisers' radio, which it almost certainly was).

>It's unimaginable that any advertisers took their word for it

It doesn't matter if advertisers actually believe it if enough people do, the impact is the same.

I mean beyond that the ads don't literally need to appear next to the racist tweets for advertisers to consider the entire platform poisoned by the behavior of Elon.

This is one of those nerd snipe "but you didn't say simon says" defenses that no one in the real world actually gives a shit about. Elon has shown his face, advertisers don't want their brands associated with that. It's that simple.

I agree with all that. I doubt Apple, IBM, etc. saw the Media Matters report and took it at face value, then redirected their advertising budgets without checking into it on their own. In fact, I'd say it's a given that they had marketing people doing their own reload-and-count exercises. And when they did, they came up with a number that was greater than their comfort level.

All platforms will have some awfulness. There's no way around it. If Twitter had a trillion good posts and 1 bad one, no one would bat an eye. It's a rounding error; things happen. But advertisers have at least an informal idea of how much badness is too much, and Twitter crossed. That's the end of the story. Apple and IBM et al ran the numbers and decided that Twitter's content is too tainted for them to want to associate with it.

And because free market, they decided not to any more.

> This weekend's fiasco about OpenAI

How many people actually cared about that? Lots here on HN, but overall?

>They curated feeds specifically trying to find offensive content and then refresh their feeds until they could find an ad placed near offensive content.

You agree, then, that twitter is doing the thing that they said it did. What's your point.

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