Washington: On Friday, Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, admitted a decline in ad expenditure and attributed the decline to ‘pressure from activists’. According to Tiffany Hsu, a tech writer who covers misinformation and disinformation, advertisers are pulling back amid the company’s massive layoffs.
Advertisers worry that Elon Musk’s leadership will enable false information and hate speech to spread widely on the site. In a conference call on Friday, civil rights organisations including GLAAD and the Anti-Defamation League urged other businesses to stop using Twitter because of enormous layoffs that had decimated what they called an already understaffed content moderation team, according to The New York Times.
The Volkswagen Group, along with a number of other businesses, has advised that its vehicle brands, including Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, and Porsche, suspend their Twitter advertising due to fears that their advertisements would run alongside objectionable content. Carlsberg Group, a Danish brewing business, has claimed to have given similar advice to its marketing personnel. Given the hazy future of Twitter’s capacity to police dangerous material and ensure brand safety for advertisers, outdoor gear and apparel store REI said that it will also freeze postings in addition to advertising expenditures.
Even Musk admitted the decline in advertising, writing on Friday morning that Twitter ‘has experienced a big loss in income,’ which he attributed to activist organisations lobbying advertisers, according to The New York Times. As marketers attempt to reconcile Musk’s pledges to make the network safe for businesses with worries about a rise in extremism and false narratives, including one supported by Musk himself, said Hsu, the first tumultuous week of Musk’s control of Twitter has given Madison Avenue whiplash.
The ad-tracking site MediaRadar published information revealing that the number of advertisers on Twitter had decreased from May only a minute before Musk issued his statement claiming ‘nothing has changed with content moderation and we done everything we could to pacify the activists’. In May, Twitter had 3,900 advertisers, whereas in August, it had 2,300. According to MediaRadar, the amount increased to 2,900 in September. General Motors, which stopped advertising on Twitter last week, spent an average of USD 1.7 million a month, according to the analytics firm.
Before July, when Musk’s dispute with Twitter started to heat up and the number of new advertisers dropped to 200, there were over 1,000 new advertisers joining the site each month. According to Hsu, a coalition of activist and civil rights organisations convened a news conference in response to Elon Musk’s post to call for a global advertising boycott of Twitter.
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