7 ms·

These companies aren't making independent decisions on this. Here is how the system works. > A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not t

by memish 4y ago

These companies aren't making independent decisions on this. Here is how the system works. > A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition. They broke the deal. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595196519598080000 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595196519598080000 This group of activists have a lot of power to enforce their agenda wrapped in a cloak of "safety standards", which is defined however they want. They pressure companies to fall in line. > Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, said the meeting with Musk “seemed productive” but she is not “encouraged enough” to pull back on the campaign that civil rights groups launched asking advertisers to suspend their ads on Twitter if Musk doesn’t commit to enforcing safety standards. > “I think we need to keep the pressure on and make sure that his actions meet his words,” González told The Hill. > Musk met with the groups after Free Press and Media Matters led nearly 50 civil society groups in a letter Tuesday calling for Twitter’s top 20 advertisers to pull their ads if he didn’t enforce safety standards. Advertising giant IPG later reportedly issued a recommendation to its clients, which include Johnson and Johnson, Coca Cola and American Express, to pause paid advertising on Twitter. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3717711-civil-rights-groups-call-for-further-action-after-meeting-with-musk/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3717711-civil-rights-g... Elon was initially playing ball with them, as most companies do because they are afraid of the consequences. He announced the council, they weren't satisfied, and he said screw it, I'll deal with the consequences.

rurp 4y ago
Poor Elon, always the victim :( If Elon and his fans can't see why advertisers would be concerned about his actions Twitter really is toast as a sustainable business.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tinalumfoil 4y ago
  - spaced-out 4y ago
    > A powerful unaccountable shadow organization that threatens social media networks to control speech and political conversations online should concern more than just Musk. WTF is a "shadow organization", can you please define that term you used? Really, it just sounds like you have a problem with free speech and/or free association. If a group of people want to form an organization called Free Press (https://www.freepress.net/ https://www.freepress.net/) and advocate for things they think are important, that's part of being in a free country.
    - tinalumfoil 4y ago
      free association != dark money organizations influencing politics They have a slick landing page, but there's nothing there about their efforts to influence advertisers and social media, and less so about who's paying them to do that stuff.
      - spaced-out 4y ago
        I'm all for more transparency around money in politics, but unfortunately there's one political party that has consistently blocked efforts address this issue. What do you mean by "efforts to influence"? You mean calling people like Elon Musk on the phone and asking them to do stuff? Or like sending emails to people on their mailing list asking them to boycott something?
      - papito 4y ago
        I want to see the Van diagram of the people who complain about these liberal activist shadow groups and those that support Citizens United. Lets really talk about dark money.
  - mhoad 4y ago
    This reads indistinguishable from q-anon shit.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > A powerful unaccountable shadow organization that threatens social media networks to control speech and political conversations online should concern more than just Musk. Industrialists and authoritarians joining together to spread a victimization narrative centered around an imagined shadowy conspiracy which the narrative attaches to marginalized groups in society and those who advocate for those marginalized groups, as the followers of those industrialists and authoritarians are on the streets committing violence against those same marginalized groups should concern everyone, given the history of that pattern.
jyxent 4y ago
Musk has a history of not being trustworthy. The smart thing to do here is to wait and see if he changes his mind on a whim.
- memish 4y ago
  Is The Hill making up those quotes?
  - theprincess 4y ago
    The tone of your writing suggests that maybe you feel like you're red pilling us or whatever but, yes, we all know that groups exist to lobby corporations to maintain policies that work toward the public good. Many groups exist that do this and each views "public good" through its own lens. If someone were a fan of Elon Musk maybe they would feel upset that advertisers are being persuaded to not place their products next to poorly curated content. If so, I would tell them that there are many conservative organizations who are working to persuade advertisers to take the opposite position along with a small army of dedicated social media trolls who work tirelessly and without pay to spread the good news of "real free speech" under the watchful eye of Mr. Musk. So take solace in that.
  - jyxent 4y ago
    I'm not sure what you're trying to imply. It literally says that they want to maintain pressure until Musk shows he is actually committed to moderation, instead of only saying he is.
hello_friendos 4y ago
x0x0 4y ago
This is pure nonsense. Some activists have certainly asked advertisers to pause. They've done so before, and will do so again. If the ad product is great, the advertisers will largely ignore them. The reality is Twitter has never been a good ad platform (recently: $5B-ish from ads, vs Google's $210B or Facebooks > $100B, numbers off the top of my head but reasonably accurate), they've never commanded premium rates, etc. Brands are very sensitive to not appearing next to the hateful content that Musk is not just allowing but high fiving (eg open anti-semitism from Kanye, etc). Ads, for everything but the best platforms (Google and FB) are also a relationship business. Musk has shown he's very unreliable, fired the people with the relationships, driven out the people running Trust and Safety, and generally been a terrible partner. Twitter's ads platform has also been buggy and is even buggier now (see recent reports of paused/stopped campaign reactivation, many multiple years old.) Additionally, Twitter's business has been swimming against long-term trends in the ads marketplace related to privacy and data movement. Twitter isn't much more than commodity pageviews that can easily be sourced elsewhere, from more reliable partners with way less brand safety risk. Musk has also made Twitter an unreliable partner and doing business with them very difficult -- see repeated reports of agencies / brands unable to even contact their CSMs. And without an idiot allowing rampant impersonalization of brands (Nintendo verified account w/ Mario flipping the bird, Eli Lilly verified account saying Insulin is free, etc etc) with no apparent plan to stop that.
- x0x0 4y ago
  Additionally: Twitter's trust and safety team flagged multiple p0/p1 risks on the twitter blue verification (revolving around impersonation) that nearly instantly played out. Musk ignored them and yolo'd the product out. As an advertiser, but also as a business partner, this simply isn't the behavior you're looking for in a business partner. Bad enough to miss the risks, but for the ceo to blow them off... Doing business with Twitter now means constantly being ready to react to whatever dumb stuff Musk decides to do despite multiple people (that he has a habit of firing) warning him about. I would probably prepared to suck it up and deal if it were Google or FB, but not for Twitter.
gloryjulio 4y ago
I didn't believe initially that a person like Elon would not understand how ads business work. Let's see how this round of f around and find out pans out.
cmh89 4y ago
Is there a source other than Musk, who has been known to lie in the past?
- riotnrrd 4y ago
  There are other sources on the record, but they contradict Musk's claim. Block quote from an Ars Technica article[1]: Some activists who attended the meeting tweeted to confirm that they never made such a deal with Musk, including Free Press co-CEO Jessica Gonzalez, who helped drive a #StopToxicTwitter coalition pressuring Twitter's top 20 advertisers to boycott the platform. “Not sure who Musk is talking about here, but I met with him a few weeks ago with civil rights leaders, and I also co-lead the #StopToxicTwitter coalition that is calling on advertisers to pause ads until he rights the ship,” Gonzalez tweeted. “I never made any such deal.” NAACP President Derrick Johnson backed Gonzalez in his own tweet denying activists made a deal with Musk. “We would never make such a deal,” Johnson tweeted. “Democracy always comes first. The decisions being made at Twitter are dangerous, and it is our duty, as it has been since our founding, to speak out against threats to our democracy. Hate speech and violent conspiracies can have no safe harbor.” [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-breaks-promise-to-form-twitter-moderation-panel-blames-activists/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-breaks-prom...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cmh89 4y ago
    That would make the most sense to me, as the article OP linked to indicated that there was never a planned pause to the pressure campaign. Just musk being musk
malshe 4y ago
> He announced the council I take that you are referring to the content moderation council (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792). I don't think he formed it though. And note that he never meant it anyways as he has been reinstating banned accounts without any council in place. In case of Trump's reinstatement, he even did an online Twitter poll.
- saurik 4y ago
  Are you sure of the timeline there? Despite everyone assuming he would do that immediately, he didn't do it until only a few days ago, which I would have thought actually jives with his story that he wasn't going to do such things until the council was formed... except then the other side defected before then, and so he might feel justified in being able to (finally) go ahead. (I am myself NOT sure of the timeline, I will say explicitly; but, it at least casually seems to "check out".)
  - memish 4y ago
    Right, people are confused about the timeline. 1. He met with them. 2. He agreed to set up a council. 3. He announced the council. 4. They kept pressuring advertisers. 5. He felt that broke the agreement, so he called off the council and moved forward with unbanning users. All of this is confirmed by both sides except for #5. There's disagreement about whether there was any kind of "deal". But clearly Elon was under the perhaps false impression it was an agreement of some sort otherwise he would not have agreed to the council idea. The point was to stop pressuring advertisers.
    - mhoad 4y ago
      Absolutely nobody in that meeting other than Elon agrees with that version of events. Everyone else came out and said that those promises were never made in the first place and quite frankly why would they just take his word on it given he has developed a long reputation as a liar.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition. They broke the deal. As with the Russian claims about a deal for NATO to permanently not expand in Eastern Europe, this is easy to show is unlikely to be true: (1) In either case, these are things that would be recognized of utmost significance by all sides. (2) In either case, the allegedly aggrieved parties (or their relevant predecessors in interests) were sophisticated actors, long used to working in an environment where durable binding agreements, particularly ones of great significance, were memorialized in writing affirmed by all parties, with copies retained by all parties, to assure that the terms are clear, fixed, and that evidence can be produced of them in the event of any public or private dispute. (3) In neither case can the allegedly aggrieved party produce the writing memorializing the agreement, or any explanation as to why they (or their predecessor in interest) would not, as a condition for what they were giving up in the agreement, insist upon the common step of memorializing the agreement in writing, (4) Therefore, it is highly improbable that the narrative of the aggrieved party is accurate.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- somenameforme 4y ago
  In the case of NATO it's even easier to show that it is true: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-e... "After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia."
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    I mean, if you fail to distinguish “giving an impression of current intention based on the current geopolitical context” with “making a binding, heritable commitment”, sure. But you’d have to be incredibly dishonest to present something that explicitly describes the former as showing the latter. Especially when the article you cite also says that the Soviets chose not to seek a binding commitment largely because they could not imagine a situation coming into existence where it would matter, given the then-current continued existence of the Warsaw Pact, and that the Western powers were disclaiming immediate intentions but in their own discussions had deferred anything longer term. So, in short, its clear that the USSR didn’t imagine the need for a long term commitment and didn’t seek one, and that the West would not have been prepared to offer one, and so no agreement incorporating such a commitment was discussed or made, verbally or otherwise.
summerlight 4y ago
> These companies aren't making independent decisions on this. Here is how the system works. I don't think you have enough expertise on digital ads these days. Allocation and execution of advertising budget is a highly data driven process. Those activists cannot really make any dents if a platform can deliver consistent, predictable and high performances. But nowadays no one thinks the word "predictable" accurately describes the status quo of Twitter so many advertisers pulled their budget to avoid hassles. Still the platform is supposed to be performing well thanks to how digital auction works. Big budgets are gone, less competitions on the auction so you're supposed to get more slots at lower costs, right? In this case, the loss should be minimal and advertisers will quickly return. But the problem is that its advertising platform is not working smoothly as before. Its ads frequency has increased significantly (1 per 5 tweets recently), which is a usual playbook for advertising networks when it needs to quickly cover significant performance loss. And Twitter was known to be one of the weakest advertising networks and it's even demonstrating a weaker performance. Okay, it might not be that problem if Elon is willing to fix all the issues. And Elon is known to be a prominent hater of digital ads and has explicitly expressed that he wants to move the major revenue stream to other products (like Twitter Blue), so it's fairly natural to conclude that its investments on advertising will deteriorate even in the longer term. I don't see any reasons for advertisers to remain on platform. Stop blaming those "activists" or whatever you (and Elon) don't like. This is a conscious decision made by Elon, he just didn't know the consequence.
- memish 4y ago
  The companies were advertising on Twitter, despite the relatively weak performance. They considered it worth the spend prior to activist pressure. If Twitter's ad performance was best in class, they would be less likely to fold. We seem to be in agreement about how this works?
  - mhoad 4y ago
    I can see you seem to be one of the very passionate for Elon types but you are fundamentally misunderstanding WHY advertisers are leaving in such high numbers. I promise you it has nothing to do with “activist groups” and everything to do with erratic and unpredictable management that is scaring them away.
papito 4y ago
This is typical Conservative victimhood. These "activists" and their "agenda" are out to cancel a rich man because he is more successful than them. Or.. something. Or maybe it's just, you know, shocking incompetence and being surprised at the consequences of being a tool.
BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
There's no "large coalition of political/social activist groups" that control ad revenue. You need to see through Elon's spin, he's trying to shift the blame for his own failures. We have a set of independent private companies making decisions in the interest of their brand and performance. The "coalitions" they're in are several large ad agencies many of them participate in, but it's the job of those ad agencies to know where it's safe to run ads and where it's not. They're not political, not social, and not activists. They're advertising professionals.

by memish 4y ago

rurp 4y ago

Poor Elon, always the victim :( If Elon and his fans can't see why advertisers would be concerned about his actions Twitter really is toast as a sustainable business.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tinalumfoil 4y ago
- spaced-out 4y ago
  > A powerful unaccountable shadow organization that threatens social media networks to control speech and political conversations online should concern more than just Musk. WTF is a "shadow organization", can you please define that term you used? Really, it just sounds like you have a problem with free speech and/or free association. If a group of people want to form an organization called Free Press (https://www.freepress.net/ https://www.freepress.net/) and advocate for things they think are important, that's part of being in a free country.
  - tinalumfoil 4y ago
    free association != dark money organizations influencing politics They have a slick landing page, but there's nothing there about their efforts to influence advertisers and social media, and less so about who's paying them to do that stuff.
    - spaced-out 4y ago
      I'm all for more transparency around money in politics, but unfortunately there's one political party that has consistently blocked efforts address this issue. What do you mean by "efforts to influence"? You mean calling people like Elon Musk on the phone and asking them to do stuff? Or like sending emails to people on their mailing list asking them to boycott something?
    - papito 4y ago
      I want to see the Van diagram of the people who complain about these liberal activist shadow groups and those that support Citizens United. Lets really talk about dark money.
- mhoad 4y ago
  This reads indistinguishable from q-anon shit.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > A powerful unaccountable shadow organization that threatens social media networks to control speech and political conversations online should concern more than just Musk. Industrialists and authoritarians joining together to spread a victimization narrative centered around an imagined shadowy conspiracy which the narrative attaches to marginalized groups in society and those who advocate for those marginalized groups, as the followers of those industrialists and authoritarians are on the streets committing violence against those same marginalized groups should concern everyone, given the history of that pattern.

jyxent 4y ago

Musk has a history of not being trustworthy. The smart thing to do here is to wait and see if he changes his mind on a whim.

memish 4y ago
Is The Hill making up those quotes?
- theprincess 4y ago
  The tone of your writing suggests that maybe you feel like you're red pilling us or whatever but, yes, we all know that groups exist to lobby corporations to maintain policies that work toward the public good. Many groups exist that do this and each views "public good" through its own lens. If someone were a fan of Elon Musk maybe they would feel upset that advertisers are being persuaded to not place their products next to poorly curated content. If so, I would tell them that there are many conservative organizations who are working to persuade advertisers to take the opposite position along with a small army of dedicated social media trolls who work tirelessly and without pay to spread the good news of "real free speech" under the watchful eye of Mr. Musk. So take solace in that.
- jyxent 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you're trying to imply. It literally says that they want to maintain pressure until Musk shows he is actually committed to moderation, instead of only saying he is.

hello_friendos 4y ago

x0x0 4y ago

This is pure nonsense. Some activists have certainly asked advertisers to pause. They've done so before, and will do so again. If the ad product is great, the advertisers will largely ignore them. The reality is Twitter has never been a good ad platform (recently: $5B-ish from ads, vs Google's $210B or Facebooks > $100B, numbers off the top of my head but reasonably accurate), they've never commanded premium rates, etc. Brands are very sensitive to not appearing next to the hateful content that Musk is not just allowing but high fiving (eg open anti-semitism from Kanye, etc). Ads, for everything but the best platforms (Google and FB) are also a relationship business. Musk has shown he's very unreliable, fired the people with the relationships, driven out the people running Trust and Safety, and generally been a terrible partner. Twitter's ads platform has also been buggy and is even buggier now (see recent reports of paused/stopped campaign reactivation, many multiple years old.) Additionally, Twitter's business has been swimming against long-term trends in the ads marketplace related to privacy and data movement. Twitter isn't much more than commodity pageviews that can easily be sourced elsewhere, from more reliable partners with way less brand safety risk. Musk has also made Twitter an unreliable partner and doing business with them very difficult -- see repeated reports of agencies / brands unable to even contact their CSMs. And without an idiot allowing rampant impersonalization of brands (Nintendo verified account w/ Mario flipping the bird, Eli Lilly verified account saying Insulin is free, etc etc) with no apparent plan to stop that.

x0x0 4y ago
Additionally: Twitter's trust and safety team flagged multiple p0/p1 risks on the twitter blue verification (revolving around impersonation) that nearly instantly played out. Musk ignored them and yolo'd the product out. As an advertiser, but also as a business partner, this simply isn't the behavior you're looking for in a business partner. Bad enough to miss the risks, but for the ceo to blow them off... Doing business with Twitter now means constantly being ready to react to whatever dumb stuff Musk decides to do despite multiple people (that he has a habit of firing) warning him about. I would probably prepared to suck it up and deal if it were Google or FB, but not for Twitter.

gloryjulio 4y ago

I didn't believe initially that a person like Elon would not understand how ads business work. Let's see how this round of f around and find out pans out.

cmh89 4y ago

Is there a source other than Musk, who has been known to lie in the past?

riotnrrd 4y ago
There are other sources on the record, but they contradict Musk's claim. Block quote from an Ars Technica article[1]: Some activists who attended the meeting tweeted to confirm that they never made such a deal with Musk, including Free Press co-CEO Jessica Gonzalez, who helped drive a #StopToxicTwitter coalition pressuring Twitter's top 20 advertisers to boycott the platform. “Not sure who Musk is talking about here, but I met with him a few weeks ago with civil rights leaders, and I also co-lead the #StopToxicTwitter coalition that is calling on advertisers to pause ads until he rights the ship,” Gonzalez tweeted. “I never made any such deal.” NAACP President Derrick Johnson backed Gonzalez in his own tweet denying activists made a deal with Musk. “We would never make such a deal,” Johnson tweeted. “Democracy always comes first. The decisions being made at Twitter are dangerous, and it is our duty, as it has been since our founding, to speak out against threats to our democracy. Hate speech and violent conspiracies can have no safe harbor.” [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-breaks-promise-to-form-twitter-moderation-panel-blames-activists/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-breaks-prom...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cmh89 4y ago
  That would make the most sense to me, as the article OP linked to indicated that there was never a planned pause to the pressure campaign. Just musk being musk

malshe 4y ago

> He announced the council I take that you are referring to the content moderation council (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792). I don't think he formed it though. And note that he never meant it anyways as he has been reinstating banned accounts without any council in place. In case of Trump's reinstatement, he even did an online Twitter poll.

saurik 4y ago
Are you sure of the timeline there? Despite everyone assuming he would do that immediately, he didn't do it until only a few days ago, which I would have thought actually jives with his story that he wasn't going to do such things until the council was formed... except then the other side defected before then, and so he might feel justified in being able to (finally) go ahead. (I am myself NOT sure of the timeline, I will say explicitly; but, it at least casually seems to "check out".)
- memish 4y ago
  Right, people are confused about the timeline. 1. He met with them. 2. He agreed to set up a council. 3. He announced the council. 4. They kept pressuring advertisers. 5. He felt that broke the agreement, so he called off the council and moved forward with unbanning users. All of this is confirmed by both sides except for #5. There's disagreement about whether there was any kind of "deal". But clearly Elon was under the perhaps false impression it was an agreement of some sort otherwise he would not have agreed to the council idea. The point was to stop pressuring advertisers.
  - mhoad 4y ago
    Absolutely nobody in that meeting other than Elon agrees with that version of events. Everyone else came out and said that those promises were never made in the first place and quite frankly why would they just take his word on it given he has developed a long reputation as a liar.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition. They broke the deal. As with the Russian claims about a deal for NATO to permanently not expand in Eastern Europe, this is easy to show is unlikely to be true: (1) In either case, these are things that would be recognized of utmost significance by all sides. (2) In either case, the allegedly aggrieved parties (or their relevant predecessors in interests) were sophisticated actors, long used to working in an environment where durable binding agreements, particularly ones of great significance, were memorialized in writing affirmed by all parties, with copies retained by all parties, to assure that the terms are clear, fixed, and that evidence can be produced of them in the event of any public or private dispute. (3) In neither case can the allegedly aggrieved party produce the writing memorializing the agreement, or any explanation as to why they (or their predecessor in interest) would not, as a condition for what they were giving up in the agreement, insist upon the common step of memorializing the agreement in writing, (4) Therefore, it is highly improbable that the narrative of the aggrieved party is accurate.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
somenameforme 4y ago
In the case of NATO it's even easier to show that it is true: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-e... "After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia."
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  I mean, if you fail to distinguish “giving an impression of current intention based on the current geopolitical context” with “making a binding, heritable commitment”, sure. But you’d have to be incredibly dishonest to present something that explicitly describes the former as showing the latter. Especially when the article you cite also says that the Soviets chose not to seek a binding commitment largely because they could not imagine a situation coming into existence where it would matter, given the then-current continued existence of the Warsaw Pact, and that the Western powers were disclaiming immediate intentions but in their own discussions had deferred anything longer term. So, in short, its clear that the USSR didn’t imagine the need for a long term commitment and didn’t seek one, and that the West would not have been prepared to offer one, and so no agreement incorporating such a commitment was discussed or made, verbally or otherwise.

summerlight 4y ago

> These companies aren't making independent decisions on this. Here is how the system works. I don't think you have enough expertise on digital ads these days. Allocation and execution of advertising budget is a highly data driven process. Those activists cannot really make any dents if a platform can deliver consistent, predictable and high performances. But nowadays no one thinks the word "predictable" accurately describes the status quo of Twitter so many advertisers pulled their budget to avoid hassles. Still the platform is supposed to be performing well thanks to how digital auction works. Big budgets are gone, less competitions on the auction so you're supposed to get more slots at lower costs, right? In this case, the loss should be minimal and advertisers will quickly return. But the problem is that its advertising platform is not working smoothly as before. Its ads frequency has increased significantly (1 per 5 tweets recently), which is a usual playbook for advertising networks when it needs to quickly cover significant performance loss. And Twitter was known to be one of the weakest advertising networks and it's even demonstrating a weaker performance. Okay, it might not be that problem if Elon is willing to fix all the issues. And Elon is known to be a prominent hater of digital ads and has explicitly expressed that he wants to move the major revenue stream to other products (like Twitter Blue), so it's fairly natural to conclude that its investments on advertising will deteriorate even in the longer term. I don't see any reasons for advertisers to remain on platform. Stop blaming those "activists" or whatever you (and Elon) don't like. This is a conscious decision made by Elon, he just didn't know the consequence.

memish 4y ago
The companies were advertising on Twitter, despite the relatively weak performance. They considered it worth the spend prior to activist pressure. If Twitter's ad performance was best in class, they would be less likely to fold. We seem to be in agreement about how this works?
- mhoad 4y ago
  I can see you seem to be one of the very passionate for Elon types but you are fundamentally misunderstanding WHY advertisers are leaving in such high numbers. I promise you it has nothing to do with “activist groups” and everything to do with erratic and unpredictable management that is scaring them away.

papito 4y ago

This is typical Conservative victimhood. These "activists" and their "agenda" are out to cancel a rich man because he is more successful than them. Or.. something. Or maybe it's just, you know, shocking incompetence and being surprised at the consequences of being a tool.

BulgarianIdiot 4y ago

There's no "large coalition of political/social activist groups" that control ad revenue. You need to see through Elon's spin, he's trying to shift the blame for his own failures. We have a set of independent private companies making decisions in the interest of their brand and performance. The "coalitions" they're in are several large ad agencies many of them participate in, but it's the job of those ad agencies to know where it's safe to run ads and where it's not. They're not political, not social, and not activists. They're advertising professionals.