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Comment by jerojero | Hacker News Reader

This is going to be a weird thing to say but: What happens if I'm a genuine nazi user (and follow lots of nazi content creators) and also interested in computers? Eventually they would see Apple ads next to Nazi posts. Right? Anyone that's been online for more than a couple seconds knows these kind of people exist.

To say that media matters manipulated the algorithm because they follow nazi people and apple is a weird argument to make. Twitter is more than capable of knowing which posts are antisemitic/nazi and it should be trivial to simply not show sponsored content around these posts. The only side effect of this would be that Nazis in the platform won't be seeing any ads.

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> Twitter is more than capable of knowing which posts are antisemitic/nazi and it should be trivial to simply not show sponsored content around these posts

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.

> Eventually they would see Apple ads next to Nazi posts. Right?

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.

Does it make any sense though? For a Nazi user seeing ads alongside Nazi content I guess feels natural, and non-Nazi user would not see the combination.

But through Twitter/X's ad revenue sharing, money you spend on Apple products goes into marketing on Twitter/X, and finances Nazis.

I'm not a user of X/Twitter, so genuine question: how does it work? Users get money for viewing ads? For ads shown along their posts?

you pay X $8/month and then you are eligible for a payout based off of some metric around how much your tweet is interacted with and the ads that were near it.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/self-proclaimed-misogynist-an...

> Eventually they would see Apple ads next to Nazi posts. Right? Anyone that's been online for more than a couple seconds knows these kind of people exist.

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.

I love the term “nazi content creator”.

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