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Advertiser exodus expected to deeply impact X ad revenue, analysis indicates
- ssklash 3y agoSeems 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Hamuko 3y agoWhat even is the legal case that he could be making?
- misterbwong 3y agoI mean, there's his Media Matters lawsuit for one: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/18/elon-musk-to-file-thermonuclear-lawsuit-as-advertisers-desert-x https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/18/elon-musk...
- dragontamer 3y agoIt'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.
- JPKab 3y agoHere's the now filed lawsuit: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24172809-x-v-media-matters-complaint-filestamped-1 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24172809-x-v-media-m...
- ecommerceguy 3y agoAnd he has a very strong case it seems.
- aw1621107 3y agoOn what grounds?
- frob 3y agoWhat 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.
- JPKab 3y ago[flagged]
- asfbnionio 3y ago[flagged]
- klyrs 3y ago> Twitter paid neo-Nazis to write racist propaganda. Hold on, I'm all about dumping on Musk and Twitter and now their unholy hate-spawn X (which I still call twitter for reasons beyond but not excluding spite)... but I'm gonna need to see a source for that one.
- asfbnionio 3y agoSure! https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/pro-hitler-and-holocaust-denier-account-x-has-paid-me-3000-ad-revenue-sharing https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/pro-hitler-and-holocaus... This seems like merely ineptitude rather than malice, but it happened.
- JPKab 3y ago[flagged]
- Sirizarry 3y ago[flagged]
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- dragonwriter 3y agoWhen 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TheCleric 3y agoHe filed it in Texas, possibly to avoid anti-SLAPP laws.
- sillywalk 3y agoIt 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.
- asfbnionio 3y agoThere 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.
- TheCleric 3y agoThat 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shiftpgdn 3y agoNature 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.
- edmundsauto 3y agoProbably true in direct response marketing, possibly unknowable in brand marketing.
- acdha 3y agoThat’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.
- aniforprez 3y agoHas 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
- perihelions 3y agoYes: 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-elon-musk-files-obvious-slapp-suit-against-non-profit-critic/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/01/free-speech-absolutist-e... https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.416212/gov.uscourts.cand.416212.1.0_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41... (plaintiff's complaint) https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.416212/gov.uscourts.cand.416212.47.0_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41... (defendant's anti-SLAPP motion)
- frob 3y agoHe's an absolutist in his belief that he should be free to sue anyone whose speech about him he does not like.
- jsbisviewtiful 3y agoIt would be nice if others start counter-suing him personally and not his companies. Don’t make the employees suffer for his tactics.
- fbdab103 3y agoDid he also ever take legal action after the supposed stalker incident which was claimed to be a result of the jet tracker?
- TheCleric 3y agoIn this specific round of bluster, he has filed suit against Media Matters.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- renlo 3y agosounds more like a cartel than a "free market"
- thenayr 3y agoGood riddance to X.
- timeon 3y agoWhy?
- topspin 3y agoBeen watching the OpenAI drama play out on X for three days now: media sites everywhere embedding X tweets.
- transcriptase 3y agoI’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…
- nwoli 3y agoAt this point they’ve rewritten nearly everything in rust so that’s unlikely to happen
- ge96 3y agoCarcinisation
- tensor 3y agoI 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.
- GenerocUsername 3y agoDepends 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
- i80and 3y agoI 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.
- nostromo 3y agoMedia 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.
- brookst 3y agoI'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.
- woooooo 3y agoBecause 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?
- brookst 3y agoThis 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?
- woooooo 3y ago
- throwaway5752 3y agohttps://thehill.com/homenews/media/4312813-elon-musk-facing-scrutiny-antisemitic-post/ 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 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.
- gotoeleven 3y agoCan 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?
- ssklash 3y agoIt'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.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoSo 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.
- xypage 3y agoThe 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- timeon 3y agoTwitter is de facto non-profit.
- Ekaros 3y agoSomeone is going to get some cheap adds for end of the year?
- mcphage 3y agoJudging 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.
- Geee 3y agoThis 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.
- fbdab103 3y agoSo, Apple, Comcast, Disney, Warner Brothers, IBM, etc are dropping their investments because they do not care?
- Geee 3y agoThey 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.
- axoltl 3y agoSort of looks like some people care.
- more_corn 3y agoOh hello, if it’s not the consequences of my own actions.
- JakDrako 3y agoI 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.