seanj

theirongiant said:

"The UK government will be testing its emergency alert system on Sunday, with the vast majority of iPhone users expected to disable their emergency alerts shortly thereafter."

mpantone

The French would probably have more complaints if this production had inaccurate costumes or the locations were blatantly wrong. However Sir Ridley isn't the type who just glosses over such details.

Marvin said:

seanj said:

9secondkox2 said:

So now that Twitter is finally being taken seriously, NOW Apple wants out? These advertisers should be ashamed. Nothing but a political shove. 

They can't take about trust and safety while trying to boycott Twitter to ensure it gets hurt. As if their tactic isn't blatantly ovious.

It’s always had a low user-base and failed to grow like other social media networks.

Twitter is one of the most used services in the world with nearly 400 million users:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users

For social media conversation, it is only behind Facebook, WeChat and Weibo.

The ad spend is quite large. Twitter makes nearly 90% of their revenue from ads. This was $4.5b out of $5b in 2021.
This is small relative to Facebook where the ad revenue in 2021 was $115b but it's still a lot of revenue.
Costs were $1.8b direct costs, $1.2b R&D, $1.2b marketing, $0.6b general/admin, $0.7b litigation.
Net income was loss of $0.5b.
In the recent quarter (before Musk takeover), the losses have been $340m, which is nearly $4m/day.

Firing 3500 employees likely saved around $0.5b/year in payroll costs and there's an aim to cut some of the direct infrastructure costs by up to $1b/year at the risk of service outages under heavy load:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musk-orders-twitter-cut-infrastructure-213643529.html

Musk owns $200b in other companies. If he needed to bankroll Twitter, at $5b/year, he could for a while and it's not likely it would lose $5b/year. Plus Twitter has around $6b in current assets so most likely sustainable for at least 3 years.

AppleInsider said:

It's unclear why Musk thinks that Twitter is entitled to the advertising dollars since the companies are executing the free speech rights they are entitled to in pulling the ads.

It demonstrates what Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey had conversations about, as does the EU trying to dictate what's permitted under their rules:

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/04/26/eu-warns-elon-musk-that-twitter-must-play-by-its-tough-new-rules

Advertisers threatening to defund Twitter and the EU threatening fines for speech that doesn't conform to their preference is restricting the freedom for people to say what they want. Restrictions are necessary if the aim is to have meaningful, civil conversations but having corporations and politicians determining this standard for public conversation is not ideal. People just assume that it's right for elected representatives to determine the status quo but imagine a time in history when people believed the Earth was the center of the universe and people were prosecuted for saying otherwise:

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-accused-of-heresy

The modern equivalent would be that if Galileo spread his (now known to be correct) ideas on Twitter, companies would stop running ads and the EU would fine Twitter unless they were removed.

This is why Musk wants to move Twitter's revenue stream to subscriptions because it takes away the control of the conversation from corporations and puts it in control of the people having the conversations. Most of the normally suppressed content is unlikely to be Galileo quality information, the vast majority of suppressed content is justifiable but once in a while there will be information suppressed that shouldn't be.

There's probably a way to make it work well for most people. What people want is control over their association. Companies don't want their brands to be shown next to offensive content because it makes it look like they are directly funding it. Twitter would need to identify offensive content/language and users and isolate the advertising from it and give advertisers assurance that this is happening. They can give advertisers the option to only run ads on selected groups of users with different grades of content.

Tweets from the most followed account would generally be safe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_accounts

If the replying comments have offensive content, they can hide the ads when a user opens the comments or hide those replies as sensitive and hide the ads when they are opened.

It would be easier to manage if the topics were tagged by category. The most likely comments to be offensive will be political. They can have a bot tag political comments and allow advertisers to avoid those conversations.

eightzero said:

OK, I'll 'fess up here. I do have a twitter account, and I follow a few entertaining accounts (at least for now). But what are these "twitter advertisers" you speak of? I'm looking at a twitter client on my desktop, and I don't see any ads. Yes, if I click on something there, I'm directed to something that does, but all I see is the 140 characters. Am I doing something wrong, because...boy...if I'm missing ads on twitter, I feel really like I'm missing out.

Ad-based Tweets get promoted into people's feeds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xsongkm8dg&t=1136s

When corporate accounts like Apple's sends out a tweet, it's probably an ad campaign for a new product:

https://twitter.com/Apple/status/1435307157944078336

https://twitter.com/Apple/status/1569424565637611521

It's quite an effective way to advertise because people don't know they are ads. Apple's main account seem to not be loading past tweets in the main feed, maybe it's just a glitch or maybe that's how they suspended the campaigns:

https://twitter.com/Apple