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Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner on Friday admitted that advertising spending on the network has dropped and blamed the reduction on “pressure from activists”. Tiffany Hsu, a tech writer covering misinformation and deception, writing in The New York Times reported that advertisers are pulling back despite significant layoffs at the firm. Advertisers also worry that Elon Musk’s leadership might allow disinformation and hate speech to thrive on the site.
Civil rights organizations like GLAAD and the Anti-Defamation League held a conference call on Friday asking other firms to boycott Twitter owing to large layoffs shredding what they characterized as an already inadequate content moderation team, reported The New York Times.
The Volkswagen Group followed many other firms in suggesting that its car brands, which include Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, and Porsche, stop their spending on Twitter out of worries that their advertising may appear alongside objectionable material.
The Danish beer firm Carlsberg Group likewise stated it has urged its marketing staff to do the same. The outdoor equipment and clothing store REI announced it will also stop postings in addition to advertising expenditure “given the uncertain future of Twitter’s capacity to filter damaging material and ensure brand safety for advertisers.”
Even Musk admitted the advertising downturn, writing on Friday morning that Twitter “has suffered a big loss in income,” which he blamed on activist organizations lobbying advertisers, reported The New York Times.
A minute before Musk wrote his statement saying “nothing has changed with content filtering and we have done all we could to placate the activists”, the ad-tracking site MediaRadar revealed information revealing that the number of sponsors on Twitter had declined from May.
Twitter had 3,900 advertisers in May and 2,300 in August. The number grew to 2,900 in September, according to MediaRadar. The analytics business revealed that General Motors, which suspended its expenditure on Twitter last week, had spent an average of USD 1.7 million monthly on the network.
There were more than 1,000 new advertisers on the site each month until July, when Musk’s spat with Twitter started to grow and the number of new advertisers plummeted to 200, said The New York Times.
Meanwhile, after Elon Musk’s remark, a coalition of human rights and activist organizations organized a press conference to urge for a worldwide advertising boycott of Twitter, said, Hsu.
