I'm sure these ousted martyrs who forced Musk's hand to stick to the agreed price are crying on their way to the bank
The full WSJ article for anyone who is interested. It leads to the question -- if 40% of the advertisers leave Twitter then does Musk even have a viable business that can stay afloat? Elon Musk Says Twitter Won’t Be ‘Free-for-All Hellscape,’ Addressing Advertisers’ Concerns Marketers worry about the Tesla CEO’s stance on content moderation, potential conflicts in auto advertising if the Twitter deal completes https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-m...enting-advertiser-flight-11666871828?mod=e2tw Madison Avenue isn’t sold on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter Inc. Advertisers are concerned about the billionaire’s plans to soften content moderation and what they say are potential conflicts of interest in auto advertising, given that he is chief executive of Tesla Inc., say people familiar with the situation. Mr. Musk said this spring that as owner of Twitter he would reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account, which the platform suspended indefinitely after linking Mr. Trump’s comments to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. That would be a red line for some brands, said Kieley Taylor, global head of partnerships at GroupM, a leading ad-buying agency that represents blue-chip brands. About a dozen of GroupM’s clients, which own an array of well-known consumer brands, have told the agency to pause all their ads on Twitter if Mr. Trump’s account is reinstated, Ms. Taylor said. Others are in wait-and-see mode. Ms. Taylor said she expects to hear from many more clients if Mr. Trump’s account returns. “That doesn’t mean that we won’t be entertaining lots of emails and phone calls as soon as a transaction goes through,” Ms. Taylor said. “I anticipate we’ll be busy.” In a message to advertisers on Twitter on Thursday, Mr. Musk said he was buying the company to “have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.” He said Twitter “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Mr. Musk said in addition to following laws, Twitter must be “warm and welcoming to all.” He said Twitter aims to be a platform that “strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.” Twitter’s chief customer officer, Sarah Personette, tweeted that she had a discussion with Mr. Musk on Wednesday evening. “Our continued commitment to brand safety for advertisers remains unchanged,” she wrote. “Looking forward to the future!” Mr. Trump has said he wouldn’t rejoin Twitter even if allowed. Representatives for Tesla and Mr. Trump didn’t respond to a request for comment. Mr. Musk has completed the acquisition of Twitter, according to people familiar with the matter, after a monthslong legal battle in which he tried to back out of the $44 billion deal he agreed to in April. The judge overseeing the legal fight had said if the deal didn’t close by Friday she would schedule a November trial. Twitter sent an email to some ad buyers earlier this week letting them know that the company is working with “the buyer” to close the acquisition by Friday and to acknowledge that Twitter is aware that advertisers have a lot of questions, according to the email, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The email, which didn’t name Mr. Musk, said Twitter would work “with the potential buyer to answer quickly.” Advertising provided 89% of Twitter’s $5.08 billion revenue in 2021. Mr. Musk has said he hates advertising. In a series of tweets earlier this year, he suggested Twitter should move toward subscriptions and remove ads from Twitter Blue, a premium program that gives users additional features. Mr. Musk describes himself as a “free speech absolutist” and has said Twitter should be more cautious about removing tweets or banning users. Mr. Musk may have reasons to avoid any drastic changes to Twitter’s ad business. Twitter will take on $13 billion in debt in the deal. The online-ad markets already are shaky, amid concerns about the economy, with Snap Inc. and Alphabet Inc. posting lower-than-expected revenue results for the September quarter. Like other ad-supported social-media platforms, Twitter provides advertisers with adjacency controls, tools that are meant to ensure ads don’t appear next to certain content the brands deem objectionable. Some ad buyers said Twitter lags behind its competitors in providing so-called brand safety features. Joshua Lowcock, global chief media officer at UM Worldwide, an ad agency owned by Interpublic Group of Cos., called Twitter’s adjacency controls inadequate and “poorly thought through.” Ad agency Omnicom Media Group evaluates the major social-media platforms’ progress on brand-safety tools every quarter. In July, Omnicom rated Twitter’s progress behind that of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Reddit, according to a document reviewed by the Journal. Robert Pearsall, managing director of social activation at Omnicom Media Group, said Twitter has made agreements to improve its brand-safety controls to meet Omnicom’s standards, but it hasn’t introduced those changes to the market yet. “There are significant concerns about the implications of a possible change to content moderation policy,” he said. Twitter has said it is working on tools to give advertisers a better idea of where their ads appear. Automotive manufacturers have expressed concerns about advertising on Twitter under Mr. Musk’s ownership, given his role at electric-vehicle juggernaut Tesla, some ad buyers said. Advertisers often share data with Twitter and other platforms—on their own customers or people that are in the market for a car—to help target their ads at the right people. Some auto companies will be wary of doing so, out of concern that data may leak to Tesla, the buyers said. Though Twitter relies on ad dollars, it isn’t one of the biggest players in the digital-ad economy. The company gets about 1.1% of U.S. digital-ad spending, according to Insider Intelligence, a much smaller slice than Google, Meta Platforms Inc. or Amazon.com Inc. Already, there have been signs of anxiety on Madison Avenue about Mr. Musk’s takeover of Twitter. In July, the company reported a 1% decrease in second-quarter revenue, which it blamed on uncertainty over the deal as well as broader pressures in the digital ad market. Given Mr. Musk’s past remarks on advertising, some advertisers wonder if Mr. Musk may exit the ad business entirely. “The question we keep getting asked is: Do we think Musk will turn off ads completely?” said UM Worldwide’s Mr. Lowcock.
Twitter makes money from ad revenue... Musk is no fool so he is going to walk a very tight line between the two. He cna let trump back on twitter but still block or ban posts that go off the rails.
Welcome to hell, Elon You break it, you buy it. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28...witter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation You fucked up real good, kiddo. Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies. I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars. The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual. What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways. Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth. Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World. So if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means: moderating more aggressively! Again, every “alternative” social network has learned this lesson the hard way. Like, over and over and over again. Also, everyone crying about “free speech” conveniently ignores that the biggest threat to free speech in America is the fucking government, which seems completely bored of the First Amendment. They’re out here banning books, Elon! President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have identical policy positions on Section 230: they both want to repeal it. Do you know why? Because the First Amendment prohibits them from making explicit speech regulations, so they keep threatening to repeal the law that allows social networks to even exist in order to exert indirect pressure on content policy. It’s not subtle! State governments are even less subtle: both Texas and Florida have passed speech regulations that overtly tell social media companies how to moderate, in open hostility to the First Amendment. Figuring out how to comply with these laws is not an engineering problem (not least because compliance might be impossible). It is a legal problem because these laws are blatantly unconstitutional, and the only appropriate response to them is to tell the government to shut up and go away. (A big problem here is that the courts are pretty stupid about the internet!) A challenge to these laws, partially funded by Twitter, is headed to the Supreme Court, which is the polar opposite of a predictable system: it is a group of uncool weirdos with lifetime appointments that can radically reshape American life however it wants. You can’t deploy AI at this problem: you have to go out and defend the actual First Amendment against the bad laws in Texas and Florida, whose taxes you like and whose governors you seem pretty fond of. Are you ready for what that looks like? Are you ready to sit before Congress and politely decline to engage in their content capture sessions for hours on end? Are you ready to do any of this without the incredibly respected policy experts whose leader you first harassed and then fired? This is what you signed up for. It’s way more boring than rockets, cars, and rockets with cars on them. And it gets worse the second you leave the United States! Germany is a huge market for Tesla. Are you going to flout Germany’s speech laws? I would bet not. The Indian government basically demands social media companies provide potential hostages in order to operate in that country; you can’t engineer your way out of that shit. Are you ready to experience the pressure Twitter faces in the Middle East to block and restrict accounts? Are you ready for the fact that the Iranian government will fucking murder people over their social media posts? (Are you ready for how Twitter is being used by Iranians protesting that government right now?) Are you excited for the Chinese government to find ways to threaten Tesla’s huge business in that country over content that appears on Twitter? Because it’s going to happen. The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that. Anyhow, welcome to hell. This was your idea.
Twitter Is Already a Graveyard, Leaked Report Suggests Despite boasting millions of "monetizable daily active users," a leaked internal report called "Where Did All the Tweeters Go?" paints a picture of a relative ghost town for posts. https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjkxym/twitter-is-already-a-graveyard-leaked-report-suggests