Linda Yaccarino: no single authentic user saw this content alongside IBM's ads

Occam’s razor is still undefeated there. What surprises me is how many folks think institutions are saints who can’t lie a la George Washington and not just a political apparatus

No, she's saying what she said:

"saw IBM’s, Comcast’s, or Oracle’s ads next to the content in Media Matters’ article. Only 2 users saw Apple’s ad next to the content, at least one of which was Media Matters. "

If you want to make good decisions about what to serve, it helps to analyse the traffic logs, separate the authentic users from the rest, do lots of analysis on authentic users only, and then make implementation decisions based on the analysed behaviour of the authentic users.

Unless Media Matters has ways to make infinitely more probable to provoke the occurrence. Which, I guess, is what happens. I wonder, for example, if they spend a lot of time browsing nazi content, and then Apple content, and then reload the page until the two appear next to each other?

(This neglects the fact that Musk publicly gives props to antisemitic memes while repeatedly saying, naw, don’t you believe your lying eyes — tweets that everyone saw, and the advertising pauses accelerated after he last did that, undermining his narrative.)

This is problematic because advertisers care about being next to any hateful content. She makes no claims about how many people saw ads next to Nazi content or racist content or homophobic content. Neither does the lawsuit. My bet is that she’s unable to make a more general statement because it would make X look bad. They clearly are able to mine the data, just not make truly exonerating statements from it.

That is being staffed appropriately.

That has dedicated, senior, responsible leadership.

That has been audited by the Media Rating Council.

Musk dismantled all of this when he took over.

I'm sure there are earlier examples, but it gets harder to search as you go back, because the typical advertising-related boycott used to be that consumers would boycott companies who advertised in ways they didn't like. (Which, of course, is why companies have strict brand safety rules in the first place.)

And remember, this whole lawsuit is to distract from Musk’s outrageous antisemitic tweet that was the reason that many of these companies pulled out in the first place, accusing Jewish people of hating white people and precipitating The Great Replacement against them, real Nazi shit.

Of course Twitter serves ads to bots. Distinguishing tests from other bots is difficult and a site as big as Twitter will be tested by very many third-party automatic tests. Suppose you run an advertising agency that buys ads on Twitter, perhaps via an intermediary. Why wouldn't you run a regular automatic test to e.g. test how many per cent of the queries for foobar point to pages that serve your foobar campaign? If you do that, you've created a bot that needs to be served the same ads as typical humans.

Apparently Twitter's system works by having tags associated with each user.

Some of those tags are added by automated systems, others are manual. Based on the tag it will affect your reach, what content you see, what ads get shown along side etc.

From all accounts Musk has reset this system back to zero, messed with the algorithm so tags are less effective and dismantled the safety team. So nothing is really working. And because it's been reset all banned users are allowed back in.

Why would they have to show them ads? Sure, platforms won’t catch coded messages, but the examples from media matters weren’t coded and should be easily detected. The request from advertisers isn’t “only show our content next to nazi posts for users who are nazis”. It is “don’t show our content next to nazi posts”. The second isn’t any harder. It is in fact easier to accomplish.

The claim is that X promised Apple (& others) that their ads would not be shown next to such content - regardless of whether that content had been served by algorithmic coincidence or because the user followed exclusively toxic accounts.

> The only side effect of this would be that Nazis in the platform won't be seeing any ads.

I imagine the no-toxic-content feature is available to select brands. Otherwise, you're right - Nazis get adblock for free. They likely see ads from a different pool, like one of those thousands of NFT AI ICO scheme ads that come with community note warnings. Point is, they were never meant to be Apple ads.