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Comment by kyle-rb | Hacker News Reader

Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff; e.g. images with Nazi flags are allowed in general but if you try to view them from an account with location set to Germany, it will give you a "this content is blocked in your country" error message.

I'd definitely be worried about driving advertisers away though. They forced YouTube's hand at least to some degree with the whole adpocalypse thing.

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The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it, similarly Twitter should be a neutral tool not a magazine. It's up to the users what they see.

You'd need a lot of market share and confidence as Musk to actually say "this is silly" but it is silly nonetheless. The big players started down the road of "ok we'll ban the worst stuff" and once they blinked it's been "but what about" all the way down.

> The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it

Good point, but...

The advertiser mostly cares when "everyone" knows they advertise for Nazis. If it's just you who knows, no biggie. They don't want it to be common knowledge.

Can’t they just give the advertiser the ability to control what kind of content they want their ads to appear alongside? Actually, don’t they do that already?

> The advertiser mostly cares when “everyone” knows they advertise for Nazis.

There are likely some advertisers who would have no qualms about targeting Nazis for advertisements, and little or no qualms about anyone knowing that they do either: criminal lawyers, divorce lawyers, mental health treatment services, drug and alcohol treatment services, certain kinds of charities (such as extremism prevention or anti-racism), etc.

It’s not just what content they’re next to, brands don’t want to be associated with certain types of content in any way. Because to a lot of consumers a brand is a part of their identity, and most people don’t identify with Nazis.

YouTube/Reddit/Facebook/etc are full of all kinds of crazy unhinged content - they may ban Nazis, but there’s many other species of crazy they don’t ban. But “A allows people (who go looking for it) to find crazy unhinged content of kind B” and “Company C advertises on A” are just completely unrelated facts in my head - and I think that’s true for most people.

Eh, no it's about the publics interpretation of appearance. Your Gmail filters out a metric shitton of spam. If they stopped doing that and all you got was thousands of penis enlargement emails per day the number of advertisers would drop significantly because the tools utility would drop significantly.

The reason 'xyz' gets banned where xyz is negatively viewed is because it tends to end up everywhere and reduce the utility of the platform.

It is silly, except to the disingenuous opportunists of all political stripes and persuasions who hold companies (they likely rarely patronized) hostage.

It's reasonable to moderate content beyond the pale. But that's on the platforms.

Running to advertisers feels like defiantly going to the other parent when you don't receive the answer you want.

I've never drawn the conclusion Bark Box or Toyota stand firmly beyond some crackpot on YT because their ad played before some content.

Except that Musk himself clearly thinks this is a concern; his letter to advertisers was one of his first actions after taking over.

  The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me,

lol

General Motors just suspended all advertising on Twitter. I've no idea how much their Twitter ad spend compares to that of other companies but certainly GM is not a small company. While I'd love to see it come out that GM doesn't want to be associated with high profile antisemites and conspiracy theorists like Ye, I'd bet it's much more straightforward: GM doesn't want its ad dollars to fund or otherwise be associated with a direct competitor (Tesla).

The problem with a Musk owned Twitter is that there is such a vast range of conflicts of interest. With Musk at the helm it's just that much harder for a company facing social/political pressure to justify doing business with Twitter.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-28/gm-tempor...

>While I'd love to see it come out that GM doesn't want to be associated with high profile antisemites and conspiracy theorists like Ye

Any company trying to claim this now should justify why they had no problem advertising on Twitter while Iran and Al Qaeda had official Twitter accounts

GM would be very happy to see Musk lose control of Tesla. Which is much more likely if Twitter fails.

The problem Twitter has here is that the ads aren't as effective as other channels, so the bar to cause advertisers to leave is a lot lower.

> Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff

Those implementations will be defeated by motivated adversaries and they will not have the expertise remaining to rebuild it. There will be many lessons learned again at great cost.

By implementations I mean the general infrastructure for enforcing country-specific laws locally, but not as a general rule of Twitter.

Non-motivated non-adversaries already defeat these systems by accident, which I assume are mostly based on user-reports. But apparently Germany's regulators are satisfied enough with Twitter's implementation, since I haven't heard about any issues with it.

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