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Comment by melon_taeppe | Hacker News Reader

twitters advertising revenue is down 54% since musk took over

https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/twitter-x-elon-musk-usag...

That's nothing to do with number of engineers you have.

A significant fractions of this layoffs weren't engineers but instead worked on moderation. When moderation was gone, antisemitic tweets (among others) became ubiquitous, which drove advertisers away.

I rarely see proper anti-semitic posts in Twitter. The problem is that people keep on insisting that posts condemning Israeli government illegal and immoral actions are anti-semitic. If anything, I welcome that people now can ask how Israel gets a pass of refusing to implement UN resolutions that back from as early as 1948 without any consequences.

I'm not talking about Israel here, I'm talking about what happened last years, where you even had Twitter accounts called Gas_the_Jews and the like spawning up and attempts to report them being automatically closed (for this one in particular, the Auschwitz memorial had to step up to get it banned).

Echoing the other comment that this is genuine antisemitism at issue here, not the very legitimate questioning of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. Much of the analysis of the increase in antisemitism on Twitter after Musk happened before Oct 7th.

It might be. He fired a whole lot of moderators who would oversee the removal of content which, among other things, would be distasteful to advertisers. It’s possible that before Musk joined Media Matters would not have been able to find anti-semitic posts next to Apple advertisements due to their removal by moderators.

Twitter was a bloodthirsty cesspool before Musk too. Maybe it got worse, I don't know, but the big difference is that buyers started to pretend to care since they did not like him.

No it definitely has gotten worse. Notably, almost every comment and post I make gets interactions from bots right away. That never used to happen before. These bots are not following me.

Also from analysis I have seen, hate speech has gone up significantly. This makes sense since there are no moderators. Twitter has recently decided to hire a substantial new group of people to rebuild a moderation team, because they truly did cut too many people there.

Don't forget about the additional 1 billion dollar debt payment he added to the company's expenses.

I don’t think that’s because of the layoffs though so the original comment is still valid.

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