X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle next to pro-Nazi content
mediamatters.org
mediamatters.org
This charade is used since the dawn of internet to police media and social media outlets using advertising boycotts.
> During all of this Musk-induced chaos, corporate advertisements have also been appearing on pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence, and neo-Nazi accounts. Yaccarino has attempted to placate companies by claiming that “brands are now ‘protected from the risk of being next to’ potentially toxic content.”
It seems the company knows that this stuff is on there and is paying lip service to protecting brands from it.
Apple's wholesome lineup of all-white products is right in line with Nazi ideology.
Come on. Mainstream brands would not care less if activist idiots didn't make a fuss about them appearing together (to use the negative PR to force their censorship upon the medium blackmailing it through the advertisers). If those activists cared about the Nazi tweet, and not for controlling the medium, they'd take offense to it alone, not in relation to whomever ads happen to be shown at the time.
It's not blackmail if these companies didn't consider the content disagreeable in the first place. Turns out a lot of companies want to save face at any cost, and they will abandon your platform the moment it deviates from their values. If you didn't expect this from Apple, IBM and Oracle, you must have been on vacation when advertisers did this on YouTube: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38965377
Ads on Twitter are almost indistinguishable from tweets that they require a triple take to notice that they are ads, so yes very much so?
Even IRL ad and billboard placement decides how much demand you get and how much you can charge for ads. But here the ad is not even visibly separate from context. The ad literally becomes product placement. Imagine you were reading Mein Kampf and there was an ad for IBM disguised for part of the book.
For Musk's new Twitter to be successful would require this radical content to be so mainstream and accepted that advertisers are genuinely not worried about such a scenario because if you're an ad company like Twitter/Google/Meta/etc then ad placement is your biz.
Twitter's previous way of appealing to big advertisers was delicate public image and bland content moderation policy but Musk apparently thinks he is Trump level business genius that would free Twitter from burning money by political posturing.
Really? Does the text or ideology leap out from the tweet's DIV and goes into the products or personel of the company's in nearby ads?
Does Apple also become Republican or Democrat, seen next to a tweet from either supporters too?
By the way, you really just compared being Republican or Democrat to being a Nazi or antisemite?
We've lived in a time where many media platforms were burning VC money and that brand safety wasn't as important. Now we're seeing everything converge back to middle-of-the-road, inoffensive content due to the reliance on advertising.
It's clearly a weak argument, and why are they focusing on X only when they could expand their criticism to the many other social media news feeds. The pants are sagging and the bias is showing.
It’s just a blatantly partisan operation mostly dedicated to criticism of conservative media with close ties to the Democratic Party and the Clintons.
If anything I’m more critical of the SLAPP free speech advocate Elon issued against Media Matters, and Ken Paxton using his power to direct government resources towards a partisan investigation of Media Matters in response to this drama. These BOTH strike me as more corrupt than Media Matters pointing out what posts are appearing by what ads to put pressure on advertisers to cut their ties with Twitter. If anything Musk and Paxton are helping media matters look squeaky clean by contrast.
My hope is that the case establishes on the record all of the skullduggery that MM peddles.
One must support and defend MM's 1A right to be complete pieces work within legal limits.
Reasonable persons should also reject their nonsense.
In fact, let me go subscribe to X right now. This is a move I have resisted, but the cause of fighting the nitwits merits support.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/21/tech/elon-musk-texas-lawsuit-...
> He has sued president Joe Biden's administration nearly 50 times.
Your 3 comments:
> I'm no adtech expert but <insert something you want to be true to validate your opinion, despite not knowing if it's true>
> Were ads being placed... at the same rate
Again, you have no idea what the answer is here. But you clearly think it supports what you believe.
> Do they not know how humans brain generally work..
A lot of assumptions baked in here that, what do you know, support your own biases. Your a self-admitted non-expert in adtech, but in the course of 3 comments it's suddenly so baffling that people can't see what is so obvious
In other words, HN is full of humans, just like you.
Or is the real complaint that nazi content is being placed next to ads for typically non-nazi twitter users?
It's also useful to understand the origin of Media Matters and know a little about its founder, David Brock. He's a lifetime "dirty tricks" political agent who by his own admission in his 2002 memoir has knowingly and repeatedly put not just misleading statements but outright lies in print before.
Elon Musk also has a record making misleading statements and in some cases outright lies, but what's under discussion is the observable behavior of the platform which leaves behind a wealth of empirical evidence; logs, humans in the loop, third party caching and scraping, etc.
If the outcome of this case becomes available to a prediction market, I would bet 10:1 against Media Matters prevailing absent a full retraction and apology which leads to the suit being dropped.
I think its worth reading, because it claims things are false and then describes how they are literally true, if perhaps incomplete.
If you know even a little of the applicable law, its also worth reading for entertainment value because its shockingly bad even beyond directly undermining its own falsity claims. There's a lot to go into about how bad, but the crowning bit of absolute failure is that it names two defendants—Media Matters and Eric Hanonoki—but then fails to even mention any allegations against Hanonoki in any of its causes of action (he is mentioned only in footnotes past the “Jurisdiction and Venue” section.)
As a layperson I might agree with you, but in these sorts of cases the judges tend to play a pivotal role, as do both the economic power of the plaintiff and the existing reputation of the defendants.
Many any engineer has been run aground by privileging the predictive power of their own literal interpretation over the case law and disposition of the actual judges.