Musk offers to buy Twitter

[Eric]

Free market or free speech, these guys need to get their core priorities worked out. And someone get Elon some cheese to go with all that whine.

 

[turbineseaplane]

It makes me think that Elon doesn't want "free speech" or anything like that at all

He just seems to want to be in control and "get whatever he wants"

 

[dada_dave]

It makes me think that Elon doesn't want "free speech" or anything like that at all

He just seems to want to be in control and "get whatever he wants"

It's what a lot of people who whine about the lack of free speech or cancel culture or political correctness or wokeness (not saying there can't be legitimate criticism on a case by case basis, I'm talking about the whiners) are actually about. They want to say/do whatever they want and they want no one to criticize them for it or god forbid show them out the door of any online/IRL community for being an asshole.

 

[fooferdoggie]

It makes me think that Elon doesn't want "free speech" or anything like that at all

He just seems to want to be in control and "get whatever he wants"

or a place he can epress his outrage at anything and everything without getting kicked off. so is twitter is rich kid toy?

 

[turbineseaplane]

Every time people like Musk bring up how they want to create an "ultimate unlimited free-speech zone" they seem to forget that plenty of sites with that setup already exist (parler, gab, truth social), it's just that normal people don't usually want to hang out on them because they can be pretty unpleasant

 

[dada_dave]

Every time people like Musk bring up how they want to create an "ultimate unlimited free-speech zone" they seem to forget that plenty of sites with that setup already exist (parler, gab, truth social), it's just that normal people don't usually want to hang out on them because they can be pretty unpleasant

Yup and to make matters worse as I wrote in a post above if the trolls have no one to troll even the echo chamber gets boring for them. Often times they *want* the normies and media and whoever else it is to be there too. Social media is funded on engagement.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Yup and to make matters worse as I wrote in a post above if the trolls have no one to troll even the echo chamber gets boring for them. Often times they *want* the normies and media and whoever else it is to be there too. Social media is funded on engagement.

Exactly right.

They want to be "awful" to people in any way they want ... and want the targeted folks to "have to tolerate it"

They want punching bags.
What a shock that a majority of the mainstream, as well as advertisers, want no part of it.

 

[lizkat]

The only hope for Twitter is that Twitter users are already so numerous that they can block/mute their way out of all that to encapsulate themselves, but that can grow tiresome over time and Twitter risks in the end being left with nothing but the worst people.

Right... and I have no problem seeing dissenting opinions but won't put up with bot-like trolling or dumbed-down and often vile memes or slogans.

It's true that I made Twitter a venue I enjoyed by ample use of their tools, including putting blocks on keywords I just didn't want in my timeline for awhile when some idiocy had gone viral.

When conventional media stopped breathlessly reporting on whatever some viral brouhaha was all about, I took that as a heads-up to ditch those particular keyword block(s) in my setup.

But it would become very tiresome to be doing all that fine-tuning of my feed more frequently. That I didn't have to do so much tweaking over time any more was one of the ways that I could see Twitter was working hard on refining their moderation... before Musk bought the company.

I'm disappointed that Musk thought to resuscitate on a wholesale basis accounts previously banned.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I'm disappointed that Musk thought to resuscitate on a wholesale basis accounts previously banned.

That was such a huge mistake. If even thinking of going down that route, you sure don't do it with "polls" that ask his skewed follower base what they think.

This is like Caeser putting out the thumb for "up or down" on gladiator lives..

It's not lost on me that Elon would like to basically be the "Caesar" here..

 

[lizkat]

It's not lost on me that Elon would like to basically be the "Caesar" here..

Well he's sure acting like Caesar doesn't have to take a back seat to any regulators, although he seems to have been backing down now and then on a few of his more absolutist ideas, so he must be getting some elbows in the ribs from his legal counsel or else he might have had to quit operating at least in Europe.

It's not lost on me that if he can keep stirring pots with his "look at me I am Crayyyyy-Zeeeee!" and drawing eyeballs from people who now have one foot in Twitter and one somewhere else, he may get back some of those advertisers.

I mean c'mon, we see the track record of corporations who after the 1/6 insurrection vowed to quit giving money to the GOP. So they did that. For one quarter, maybe two. Got lots of favorable press, along with some jabs about impending hypocrisy. And sure enough, before year end, back in the game.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Well he's sure acting like Caesar doesn't have to take a back seat to any regulators, although he seems to have been backing down now and then on a few of his more absolutist ideas, so he must be getting some elbows in the ribs from his legal counsel or else he might have had to quit operating at least in Europe.

It's not lost on me that if he can keep stirring pots with his "look at me I am Crayyyyy-Zeeeee!" and drawing eyeballs from people who now have one foot in Twitter and one somewhere else, he may get back some of those advertisers.

I mean c'mon, we see the track record of corporations who after the 1/6 insurrection vowed to quit giving money to the GOP. So they did that. For one quarter, maybe two. Got lots of favorable press, along with some jabs about impending hypocrisy. And sure enough, before year end, back in the game.

For sure he might get some advertisers back, but the metrics will dictate less spend for them if it keeps going this way.

I saw the Apple social AD spend person commenting how much they'd cut back due to reduced engagement and bot engagement.

Twitter is really something that needs to have mass appeal to be what it was.
It simply won't work with folks running amok and being jerks and harassing, etc

Elon is going to spend a lot of time and money to re-learn lessons Twitter already learned over the course of time.

 

[lizkat]

For sure he might get some advertisers back, but the metrics will dictate less spend for them if it keeps going this way.

I saw the Apple social AD spend person commenting how much they'd cut back due to reduced engagement and bot engagement.

Twitter is really something that needs to have mass appeal to be what it was.
It simply won't work with folks running amok and being jerks and harassing, etc

Elon is going to spend a lot of time and money to re-learn lessons Twitter already learned over the course of time.

I wish he'd just get tired of the hassles (and distraction from his other businesses, and risk to Tesla of ending up with a margin call on his collateral, duh!)... and flip the thing to a co-investor with deep enough pockets to not only take it off Elon's hands but then plow some money back in to pull it out of its nosedive.

 

[Chew Toy McCoy]

Every time people like Musk bring up how they want to create an "ultimate unlimited free-speech zone" they seem to forget that plenty of sites with that setup already exist (parler, gab, truth social), it's just that normal people don't usually want to hang out on them because they can be pretty unpleasant

This reminds me of a study that concluded that right-wing men are open to dating left-wing women but left-wing women aren't really open to dating right-wing men. Of course to right-wing men this serves as proof that left-wing women are elitist which completely ignores the fact that right-wing men tend to be misogynist assholes, or at the very least they have to prove that they aren't on an individual basis. Left-wing women don't really want to date people who have a preloaded long list of things or people they hate or are against.

 

[turbineseaplane]

@Chew Toy McCoy

A great post and a very accurate one.

In my friend group, we have one guy who's a bit like this -- perpetually single and doesn't get the "why".
Turns off women, actively, out at bars and events by very quickly showing his cards.

(we're all friends for decades and keep it all going by working "around" the differences -- it's tough -- Trump era set this all ablaze in a way it never was before)

 

[dada_dave]

Just what did he expect?

An interesting blog post by a (now former) advertiser on Twitter:

I told my team to pause our $750K/month Twitter ads budget last week

I’ve seen a lot of technical and ideological takes on Elon Twitter but wanted to share the marketing perspective. For background I’m a director at a medium sized b2b tech company (not in finserv anymore) running a team that deploys about $80M in ad s...

www.teamblind.com

Main points:

- Performance fell significantly. CPMs didn’t drop but our engagement went way down. Maybe it’s a shift in users on the platform, maybe it’s ad serving related.
- Serious brand safety issues. Our organic social and CS teams got dozens of screenshots of our ads next to awful content. Replies to our posts with hardcore antisemitism and adult spam remained up for days even when flagged.
- Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.
- Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.

Basically even beyond the sudden lack of content moderation causing brand safety problems, there are technical issues, a lack of communication from Twitter (because of everyone has been fired), and even less engagement on ads based on the metrics they care about.

 

[Eric]

An interesting blog post by a (now former) advertiser on Twitter:

I told my team to pause our $750K/month Twitter ads budget last week

I’ve seen a lot of technical and ideological takes on Elon Twitter but wanted to share the marketing perspective. For background I’m a director at a medium sized b2b tech company (not in finserv anymore) running a team that deploys about $80M in ad s...

www.teamblind.com

Main points:



Basically even beyond the sudden lack of content moderation causing brand safety problems, there are technical issues, a lack of communication from Twitter (because of everyone has been fired), and even less engagement on ads based on the metrics they care about.

He wanted all that free (hate) speech and then fired everyone involved on moderation, now wonders why advertisers don't want their ads next to unchecked hate-filled anti semitic content?

BTW I applaud Tim Cook for taking the high road here by not responding to this idiot's tweet, no need to get into the gutter with the trolls.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Paused AD campaigns suddenly "reactivated"?

Very very fishy (and unacceptable)

 

[Pumbaa]

Paused AD campaigns suddenly "reactivated"?

Very very fishy (and unacceptable)

Is that still going on?

More than fishy in that case.

 

[Nycturne]

He wanted all that free (hate) speech and then fired everyone involved on moderation, now wonders why advertisers don't want their ads next to unchecked hate-filled anti semitic content?

It is also hard to keep/court larger advertising accounts if you don't have account managers anymore to work with those advertising accounts. Having a team of account managers to work with high-profile, high-spend clients seems rather important when your business model is built around B2B. I'd have expected he'd have picked this part up from SpaceX.

So, what the heck?

 

[Eric]

It is also hard to keep/court larger advertising accounts if you don't have account managers anymore to work with those advertising accounts. Having a team of account managers to work with high-profile, high-spend clients seems rather important when your business model is built around B2B. I'd have expected he'd have picked this part up from SpaceX.

So, what the heck?

He probably fired them, too. You get the feeling this is going turn into an out of the pocket venture so it's probably a good thing he's one of the richest people on the planet. In the end losing tens of billions just so you can turn against such a huge swath of the existing Twitter user base is the best possible is priceless. Couldn't be happening to a nicer guy.