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raison de arizona
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#1651

Post by raison de arizona »

Slarti the White wrote: Thu Jan 19, 2023 2:10 am
RTH10260 wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 10:24 pm
Twitter is reportedly struggling to break even as advertisers continue to flee
But media partners aren't going anywhere.


However, Twitter can take some consolation in its ability to attract and retain media partners. According to Axios, the platform still has deals with over three dozen media companies, news outlets (including the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, Forbes, Conde Nast and USA Today) and sports leagues (including the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, NASCAR and PGA Tour) in the first half of this year. They find Twitter too profitable to quit in an uncertain economy — even while balking at embracing it publicly.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/twit ... 25994.html
(original: Engadget)
Does anyone know what the nature of these deals with media companies and sports leagues are? If both the the partners and Twitter are profiting, where does the money come from?
Soylent Green, it’s people! People who then react to the advertising and spend their money at the above mentioned businesses. Which the companies use to pay Twitter for the ads, no doubt calculating their ROAs (return on advertising.)
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#1652

Post by neeneko »

raison de arizona wrote: Thu Jan 19, 2023 6:30 am Soylent Green, it’s people! People who then react to the advertising and spend their money at the above mentioned businesses. Which the companies use to pay Twitter for the ads, no doubt calculating their ROAs (return on advertising.)
Though more likely : various executives have their personal brand wrapped up in Twitter being an effective place to advertise, and admitting it is not and thus they wasted their money would hurt their careers. So personal brands and sunk cost politics.
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#1653

Post by raison de arizona »

neeneko wrote: Thu Jan 19, 2023 10:08 am
raison de arizona wrote: Thu Jan 19, 2023 6:30 am Soylent Green, it’s people! People who then react to the advertising and spend their money at the above mentioned businesses. Which the companies use to pay Twitter for the ads, no doubt calculating their ROAs (return on advertising.)
Though more likely : various executives have their personal brand wrapped up in Twitter being an effective place to advertise, and admitting it is not and thus they wasted their money would hurt their careers. So personal brands and sunk cost politics.
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#1654

Post by Slarti the White »

raison de arizona wrote: Thu Jan 19, 2023 10:38 am
neeneko wrote: Thu Jan 19, 2023 10:08 am
raison de arizona wrote: Thu Jan 19, 2023 6:30 am Soylent Green, it’s people! People who then react to the advertising and spend their money at the above mentioned businesses. Which the companies use to pay Twitter for the ads, no doubt calculating their ROAs (return on advertising.)
Though more likely : various executives have their personal brand wrapped up in Twitter being an effective place to advertise, and admitting it is not and thus they wasted their money would hurt their careers. So personal brands and sunk cost politics.
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Thanks!

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of ROA vs. time for all of Twitter's advertisers (and even more so to correlate that with the politics of their customers). Certainly we know that many advertisers were willing to pay a fortune (and presumably made a bigger fortune in return) advertising on e.g. Rush Limbaugh's show. Is Twitter's demographics changing to be more advantageous to certain groups of advertisers or is the advertiser pool shrinking like you suggest and allowing the remaining advertisers to get more penetration? In any case, your comment shows that there is more to the picture than just advertisers leaving because of the optics.

Fascinating.
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#1655

Post by Suranis »

So, this commentator suggests that what "the Twitter files" actually prove is that Twitter was amplifying conspiracy and Right wing accounts becasue they were afraid of backlash if they did otherwise, and the moderation crew was unsupported and underfunded.

https://thecoopscoop.substack.com/p/how ... tid=Zxz2cZ
How Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi Are Inventing a New Conspiracy Theory
The notion that Twitter leaned left around January 6 is a fabrication

....

As I slogged thru the Taibbi-written Twitter threads, I was unimpressed from the get-go. The material was incomplete and the conclusions were wildly exaggerated as he attempted to prove that a cabal of liberal Twitter employees aided by shadowy figures from three letter state agencies unfairly discriminated against conservative users and blocked or downplayed their posts and in many cases suspended their accounts. Needless to say, most of those “discriminated” against were insurrectionists, hate-mongers, racists, neo-nazis, peddlers of quack information about vaccines, and ultimately, former President Trump whose account was shut down two days after he incited the violent siege of the Capitol (and veritably all of whom have been gleefully reinstated by Musk).

The more I read about these “atrocities” the more sympathy I gathered for the former Twitter folks who were able to sort out this toxic crap and can it. Nobody, especially Musk, has yet found the most efficient way to fairly moderate a massive social media network but what Taibbi’s threads made unwittingly clear was that Twitter had been struggling to do so, making some honest mistakes along the way, but nevertheless giving it a good try with minimum resources.

That’s hardly the conclusion that the Musk-Taibbi duo reached. They asserted that they had “proven” that pre-Musk Twitter was more or less a puppet of nefarious liberals who were trying to skew the national dialogue to the left and now they have come perilously close to inventing one more conspiracy theory i.e. that Twitter had more or less thrown the 2020 election unfairly to Biden, snatching victory from Trump.

All you have to do is read the replies to Taibbi’s threads to see the orgasmic embrace given this crap by literal hordes of explicit alt-right, election denying, anti-vax, racist, fascist adjacent loons, kooks, and screwballs who constitute the cheering section of the Twitter Files. Musk must feel quite self-satisfied even if he is driving the platform into the ground. As to the once reliable Taibbi, he has shredded his credibility and is either experiencing temporary insanity or has become a cynical grifter, chalking up thousands of new pro-Trump paying subscribers to his substack (I lean toward the latter).

All of which brings us to an actual, well-reported, fully documented piece of journalism (unlike Taibbi’s slap dash hodgepodge) that appeared last week in the Washington Post and –inadvertently mind you – completely and utterly destroyed the main thrust of the Twitter Files.

The story is based on a 122 page internal memo developed by the January 6 committee that, after arduous and lengthy investigation, revealed the role that big social media, including Twitter, played in fomenting the attack on the capitol. That memo wound up being basically deleted in the final report by the committee out of fear of delving too deep into the rise of violent extremism and by not wanting to provoke a nasty debate with big tech companies.

Here are a couple of key graphs from the Washington Post piece:

“Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.

“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”

This truth is the complete opposite of the Musk-Taibbi propaganda that the Twitter Files claim.

This damning material was mostly excluded by the final report of the Jan6 committee thanks to pressure applied by Liz Cheney to keep a narrow focus on Donald Trump himself and to not delve deeply on the roots and networks of domestic extremism.

More from the Post:

Some of what investigators uncovered in their interviews with employees of the platforms contradicts Republican claims that tech companies displayed a liberal bias in their moderation decisions — an allegation that has gained new attention recently as Musk has promoted a series of leaked internal communications known as the “Twitter Files.” The transcripts indicate the reverse, with former Twitter employees describing how the company gave Trump special treatment. [emph. added]

Twitter employees, they testified, could not even view the former president’s tweets in one of their key content moderation tools, and they ultimately had to create a Google document to keep track of his tweets as calls grew to suspend his account.

“ … Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump,” said one former employee, who testified to the committee under the pseudonym J. Johnson.

There is much much more damning detail in the Washington Post story which really deserves a very close read that I fully encourage. I could continue parsing it out but the main point is clearly stated above.

All in all, the Twitter Files have accomplished very little other than throwing more fuel on the fires of unhinged conspiracy theories. Musk has reportedly lost some $200 billion in the past few months as he has ignored serious problems at Tesla while spending his time on Twitter calling to jail Dr. Fauci among other gross stupidities. And Matt Taibbi? What a disgraceful fail and fall. ++

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#1656

Post by Volkonski »

Drew Harwell
@drewharwell@mastodon.social
An escalation in hate speech and violent threats on Twitter: "It’s very sad to see this thing that so many of us cared for and built being decimated piece by piece“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... y-twitter/ @JosephMenn
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#1657

Post by Lani »

The link is to "Attacks on U.S. Jews and gays accelerate as hate speech grows on Twitter," and it's horrific.
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#1658

Post by Volkonski »

Trump Looks to Ditch His Own Social Media Site
The ex-president is planning his first tweets with a few months to go on his Truth Social contract


https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234665307/
IN THE MONTHS ahead of what’s likely to be a brutal Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump and his 2024 campaign are laying the groundwork for his big, bombastic return to major social media platforms. Such a return, though, would inevitably involve Trump screwing over one of his own companies — and he’s been telling confidants that he is prepared to do just that.

When Trump first founded Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), he agreed to a “social media exclusivity term” that required him to “first channel any and all social media communications” to his Truth Social account for six hours before posting the content to other platforms, according to SEC filings.

Since late last year, former President Trump has informed several people close to him that he doesn’t want to re-up the exclusivity agreement with his social media company, Truth Social, two sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. “There’s not going to be a need for that,” is how one of the sources recalls Trump describing his soon-to-expire contractual obligation.

The 18-month term of that requirement is up in June — right as the Republican primary is expected to begin heating up. After that, Trump’s exclusivity term would automatically renew for six month periods “unless notice is given.” In the event his exclusivity term expires, Trump would still be “required to post contemporaneously to Truth Social.”

“He said there’s an expiration date and that he didn’t want to make commitments,” the other source says.
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#1659

Post by raison de arizona »

Well that’s great. Another nail in the coffin. Just what that twit needs.
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#1660

Post by RTH10260 »

:lol: just what the investors into his site needed to hear. Time for Digital World Acquisition Corp. to return the funds :blackeye:
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#1661

Post by Volkonski »

Rolling Stone
@RollingStone@mstdn.social
Twitter has reinstated the account of white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234667137/
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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#1662

Post by raison de arizona »

Fuentes is a particularly nasty piece of work, misogynistic in the extreme as well.

:thumbsup:
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#1663

Post by humblescribe »

But...but will happen to his guy pal, Devin Nunes? :shrug:
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#1664

Post by raison de arizona »

Volkonski wrote: Tue Jan 24, 2023 1:59 pm Rolling Stone
@RollingStone@mstdn.social
Twitter has reinstated the account of white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234667137/
Well...that didn't last long.
https://twitter.com/Shayan86/status/1618260488508571649
Shayan Sardarizadeh @Shayan86 wrote: Twitter has suspended the verified account of US white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes again, only one day after his July 2021 ban was reversed by the platform.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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#1665

Post by Dr. Ken »

raison de arizona wrote: Wed Jan 25, 2023 9:54 am
Volkonski wrote: Tue Jan 24, 2023 1:59 pm Rolling Stone
@RollingStone@mstdn.social
Twitter has reinstated the account of white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234667137/
Well...that didn't last long.
https://twitter.com/Shayan86/status/1618260488508571649
Shayan Sardarizadeh @Shayan86 wrote: Twitter has suspended the verified account of US white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes again, only one day after his July 2021 ban was reversed by the platform.
Wow that escalated quickly
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#1666

Post by bob »

Ali Alexander also rebaned:
Image ImageImage
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#1667

Post by raison de arizona »

bob wrote: Wed Jan 25, 2023 1:37 pm Ali Alexander also rebaned:
https://twitter.com/Shayan86/status/1618266812764020736
:thumbsup:

That said, Elmo's Twitter is becoming more of a racist cesspool everyday, lots of n-words and whatnot.
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#1668

Post by neonzx »

So what happened to Mr "Free Speech" Elon? :biggrin:

I read somewhere this morning that Twtter ad revenue dropped ~77% for Dec 2022 vs. Dec 2021. :whistle:
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#1669

Post by Volkonski »

Ad spending on Twitter falls by over 70% in Dec - data

https://www.reuters.com/technology/ad-s ... 023-01-25/
Advertising spend on Twitter Inc dropped by 71% in December, data from an advertising research firm showed, as top advertisers slashed their spending on the social-media platform after Elon Musk's takeover.

The recent data by Standard Media Index comes (SMI) as Twitter is moving to reverse the advertiser exodus. It has introduced a slew of initiatives to win back advertisers, offering some free ads, lifting a ban on political advertising and allowing companies greater control over the positioning of their ads.

:snippity:

Fourteen of the top 30 advertisers on Twitter stopped all advertising on the platform after Musk took charge on Oct. 27, according to the Pathmatics estimates.

In a November event on Twitter Spaces, Musk addressed the issue of companies pausing ads and said that he understands if advertisers "want to give it a minute."

Around the same time, Musk had also blamed activist groups for pressuring advertisers to pull ads on social media platform. Ad sales account for about 90% of Twitter's revenue.
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#1670

Post by raison de arizona »

‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Censors BBC Doc Critical of India's PM on Twitter
Twitter is censoring links to a BBC documentary that examined Prime Minister Modi's role in violent 2002 riots that saw over 1,000 deaths.

Twitter has censored links to a BBC documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the request of the Indian government, despite CEO Elon Musk’s previously stated commitments to free speech on the platform.

The BBC documentary India: The Modi Question examined the role of the prime minister in violent 2002 riots that saw over 1,000 deaths, mostly Muslims. The documentary highlighted memos and reports criticizing Modi, including one that said the riots had “all the hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing." The documentary was not aired in India, but has nonetheless caused a furor. India ordered the documentary to be blocked in the country using emergency legislation, and The Intercept reported that takedown requests were submitted to Twitter.

Twitter acted on those requests, The Intercept reported on Tuesday night, as the takedown requests coincided with reports from Indian Twitter users that links to the documentary were being blocked. Actor John Cusack, who shared a link to the documentary, was caught in the geo-block and told The Intercept, “I received two notices that I’m banned in India.” The blocks apparently began days ago, with takedown requests dated January 20.

"CENSORSHIP," Indian politician Derek O'Brien tweeted last week. "@Twitter @TwitterIndia HAS TAKEN DOWN MY TWEET of the #BBCDocumentary, it received lakhs of views." He posted a screenshot that shows a notification saying that the tweet was banned due to a legal request from the Indian government.

Musk framed his takeover of Twitter last year as being a win for free speech, and he pledged to only moderate speech on the platform if it went outside the bounds of the law. His actions since then have been a series of backslides. For example, he banned accounts using public information to track his and other powerful peoples' flights after saying he would never do so, in order to preserve freedom of speech.
:snippity:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjkybx/ ... rd_twitter
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#1671

Post by humblescribe »

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." O. Wilde
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#1672

Post by Gregg »

This just in...

Army restores Commissions of Benedict Arnold, Robert E. Lee and other "fine people, on both sides..."

Useless Trivia, the Army actually did re-Commission more than a few Confederate Officers in the US Army, most notably General Joseph Wheeler a Lt General in the CSA and later a Major General in the United States Army, serving in the Spanish-American War and in the Philippines.
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#1673

Post by Jim »

Here you go, great opportunity to get in on the ground floor...now that EM has taken Twitter there...

Elon Musk is trying to raise up to $3 billion to pay off expensive Twitter debt amid struggles to keep advertisers: WSJ
Elon Musk is looking to line up as much as $3 billion to pay off part of the $13 billion loan package he used to acquire Twitter last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Per the Journal, the Twitter CEO was in talks with potential backers about selling $3 billion in new shares of the company in December, people familiar with the matter said. The new fund raise could be use to pay down the highest cost, unsecured portion of Twitter's $13 billion debt package.

According to the report, Musk and his advisers were trying to raise the money at the takeover price of $54.20 per share by the end of last year, though prospective investors weren't interested due to Twitter's financial condition.

An account tweeted at Musk after the Wall Street Journal report was published on Wednesday, asking if the story was "accurate."

In response, Musk tweeted "No."
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#1674

Post by Gregg »

The company wasn't worth anywhere near $54.20 a share (a price he pulled out of his ass using the "420" ending as a pot themed joke, just like his offer to take to Tesla private at $420) when he bought it. It was generally considered over-valued at the ~$33 it was trading at. Now that he's spent 6 months trashing it, and with revenue down 70% (FFS is that real?, checks, yes it is) who here thinks this train wreck of a right wing cesspool is worth anything more than $10?

If it went public tomorrow I'd buy @ $4 a share and only then if the new public owners promised to make Elmo hit the bricks.
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#1675

Post by RTH10260 »

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1618867135962574848
Mr. Tweet @elonmusk

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