Tag Archives: Twitter

X May Lose Up To $75 Million In Revenue As More Advertisers Pull Out

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Engadget reported that X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, typically earns the most money in the last months of the year, as brands ramp up their advertising campaigns. According to The New York Times, though, the company’s earnings report for this quarter might look different than usual.

Based on internal documents The Times has seen, over 100 brands and even other types of advertisers, such as political candidates, have fully paused their ads on the website, while dozens more are considering pulling their campaigns. If advertisers don’t come back, X could lose up to $75 million in ad revenue earnings this year.

According to Engadget, IBM, Apple and Disney were among the brands that quickly pulled their ads from X after the incidents. Lionsgate specifically cited Musk’s tweet as its reason for suspending its advertising campaigns, while Ubisoft was one of the first video game companies to withdraw its ads from X.

According to The Times’ report, Airbnb has halted over $1 million worth of advertising on X, and Netflix has pulled $3 million in ads. X could also lose $4 million in ad revenue due to Microsoft’s subsidiaries pausing their campaigns. Uber and Coca-Cola are two other well-known brands that have chosen to put their advertising on X on hold.

Reuters reported that Musk backing an antisemitic post on the platform last week has led several companies including Walt Disney and Warner Bros Discovery to pass their advertisements on the site formerly called Twitter.

According to Reuters, X has struck back and sued media watchdog group Media Matters, alleging the organization defamed the platform with a report that said ads for major brands including Apple and Oracle had appeared next to posts touting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.

Advertisers have fled X since Musk bought it in October 2022 and reduced content moderation, resulting in a sharp rise in hate speech on the site, according to civil rights groups.

Mashable reported that the ad exodus followed X owner Elon Musk’s public support of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, in a tweet that is amazingly still up. That, combined with a general influx of hateful content that has the tendency to appear next to ads, has created a hostile environment for advertisers.

According to Mashable, X even confirmed a report from watchdog group Media Matters that ads on the platform are being shown alongside hateful content – but X is suing Media Matters for it anyway, claiming that it was a deliberate, malicious attack to “drive advertisers from the platform.”

The Hill reported that the New York Times said it viewed “internal documents” revealing that the social media company is in a tough position. The documents reportedly list over 200 ad units from companies like Amazon and Coca-Cola that have stopped or are considering pausing their advertising on X.

According to The Hill, The Times, said the documents are from the sales team at X, and that they are used to track the impact from advertising pullbacks in November.

In my opinion, there were many steps that Elon Musk could have taken to stop the exodus of brands pulling away their advertising from X, formerly known as Twitter. Suing Media Matters, who pointed out the antisemitic content on Mr. Musk’s platform, will not bring advertising money back.

X Sues Media Matters To Silence Moderation Criticism

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X, formerly Twitter, has followed through with owner Elon Musk’s threat to sue the left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters, The Verge reported. Media Matters reported last week that X “has been placing ads for major brands” like Apple and IBM “next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.”

According to The Verge, Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino have dubbed the report unrepresentative of X’s general user experience. Several companies nonetheless pulled ads after that report and Musk’s direct endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory – and Musk’s lawsuit claims Media Matters is legally liable for X’s loss.

Neither Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, nor X argues that Media Matters was falsely claiming to see ads on pro-Nazi content. In fact, the suit confirms that the screenshots the organization posted are real. But it alleges the organization “manipulated” the service to make X serve the offending ads.

The lawsuit accuses Media Matters of interference with contract, business, disparagement and interference with prospective economic advantage – claims that could be difficult to prove given the First Amendment’s high bar for legally prosecuting speech, The Verge reported.

“We are going to continue our work undeterred. If he sues us, we will win,” Media Matters president Angelo Carsone told The Verge in a previous statement, saying that “Elon Musk has spent the last few days making meritless legal threats, elevating bizarre conspiracy theories, and lobbing vicious personal attacks against his ‘enemies’ online.”

The Hill reported that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said Monday that his office is opening an investigation into Media Matters for America over its recent reports accusing X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, of placing ads for mainstream brands next to pro-Nazi and white nationalist content.

According to The Hill, Paxton’s office said it is investigating the liberal media watchdog group for “potential fraudulent activity” after X sued Media Matters in federal court in Texas, alleging it “manipulated the algorithms” on the platform in order to produce the reports and “alienate advertisers.”

Media Matters initially released a report Thursday saying that it had found ads for companies including Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity and IBM next to posts on X celebrating Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, The Hill reported. In a follow up report on Friday, the watchdog said it had also found ads for Amazon, NBA Mexico, NBCUniversal Catalyst, Action Network and Club for Growth next to posts featuring white nationalist hashtags.

CNBC reported the National Football League is sticking with X, formerly known as Twitter, as Elon Musk’s site faces an advertiser revolt over hate speech and antisemitism on the platform.

According to CNBC, the NFL has partnered with the platform since 2013 as part of an effort to bring fans exclusive content.

Since Musk took over last fall, the platform has been caught up in several controversies, including those surrounding X’s policy for moderating harmful content.

In my opinion, the correct thing to do, when discovering that antisemitic and Nazi content is on your platform, is to actively remove that content. Filing a lawsuit in an effort to stifle what Media Matters found indicates Musk is not interested in cleaning up X at all.

A Glitch Temporarily Wiped Out X Images And Links

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Since Friday, users of X, formerly Twitter, started noticing that many images posted on the platform between 2011 and 2014 were no longer accessible, according to various media reports, Insider reported.

The glitch resulted in some of the most viral moments in internet history becoming inaccessible. It also seemed to affect links posted in the same three-year period – some of which have become shortened links.

The most famous casualty was Ellen’s star-studded selfie at the Oscars, posted in 2014. The post racked up over 2.8 million reshares and 2 million likes since being posted in March 2014.

According to Insider, on Saturday, users posted about losing access to other pieces of internet history, from pictures about the Arab Spring to posts by the K-Pop group BTS.

At the time of writing, access to images and links from 2011 to 2014 – including Ellen’s selfie – continued to be inconsistently available, per Insider’s review.

Insider also reported that X first introduced image-sharing to its platform in June 2011. It remains unclear why the glitch occurred, and neither Musk nor X acknowledged the glitch since the outages began.

However, these outages come amid increasing instability on the platform. Widespread outages have been on the rise since Musk made massive job cuts to the company in October last year, Insider reported in March.

One of the most high-profile outages occurred in February when the platform became inaccessible because an employee accidentally deleted data on a key function. The team responsible for it had already left the company.

The Verge reported that the @Support account at X, the company formerly known as Twitter until Elon Musk rebranded it, says, “Over the weekend we had a bug that prevented us from displaying images from before 2014. No images or data were lost. We fixed the bug, and the issue will be fully resolved in the coming days.”

There are no details mentioned in the post about what the bug was, when it started happening, or why it will take an unspecified amount of time to resolve. In looking up the problem, we learned that changes by Twitter in 2016 used metadata on tweets posted from December 2014 going forward to fill in additional data from linked webpages and allow attachments that didn’t eat up a tweet’s character count, and it was only earlier posts that were hit by the bug.

To me, it seems like X is having unexpected (and strange) problems nearly every day. I suppose this is what happens when the person in charge of a major social media company decides that the first move is to fire the vast majority of its workers. Things typically do not run smoothly after that.

Twitter Deletes All User Photos And Links From 2011 – 2014

Twitter,

Twitter, the social media company officially known as X, appears to have deleted all images from the website that were posted between 2011 and 2014. Links that used Twitter’s native shortening service are also broken, Forbes reported.

According to Forbes, its not immediately clear if this was an intentional act or an error, but whatever’s happening is causing concern among users who’ve been on the site for over a decade.

It appears that Twitter’s link-shortening domain – the new URL that Twitter generates so it can track user activity – is the likely culprit behind why images no longer display and links no longer work.

Twitter launched in 2006 but didn’t support native image uploads until the summer of 2011. Several image-hosting services sprung up to support Twitter, like TwitPic, but that service shut down in 2014 and many images from those early days are lost. But now it seems images that were posted to Twitter directly from 2011 to 2014 could be in danger as well, since they’re no longer loading on the site, Forbes reported.

PCMag reported that Twitter appears to have deleted all of the images that were uploaded to the site between 2011 and 2014. The issues was discovered Saturday by Twitter user Tom Coats.

According to PCMag, along with the loss if images, links that were created during the same time period using Twitter’s link shorter also no longer work. Coats’ tweet about the issue has since had context added to it saying that images have disappeared and links are broken, but the data is still saved on Twitter’s servers.

One of the tweets impacted is Ellen DeGeneres’ famous Oscars selfie, which generated 2.8 million retweets and currently holds the title as the most retweeted post of all time. That particular image was restored on Saturday afternoon along with a tweet of Barack Obama hugging the First Lady after his reelection in 2012.

The Verge reported that X, which was formerly known as Twitter until its recent rebranding, is having a problem displaying old posts that came with images attached or any hyperlinks converged through Twitter’s built-in URL shortener. It’s unclear when the problem started, but it was highlighted on Saturday afternoon in a post by Tom Coats, and a Brazilian vTuber, @DaniloTakagi, had pointed out a couple of days earlier.

As it is, it appears to affect tweets published prior to December 2014. No videos are affected (Twitter only added native image support in 2011 and built-in videos in 2016), but links to YouTube, for example, are now just text with a t.co URL that doesn’t work.

Personally, I think it’s sad that Elon Musk either intentionally, or accidentally, deleted a huge chunk of Twitter’s past content. He needs to be more careful about the decisions he makes, and should think hard before implementing something on a whim.

Musk Says X’s ‘Block’ Feature Is Going Away

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Part of the X roadmap? Off-handed reply? Simple attempt to get a rise out of people? Time will tell, TechCrunch reported. The one thing we can say for sure is that X’s owner responded to a post on the platform (on August 18) foreshadowing the potential removal of the block feature.

“Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs,” Elon Musk wrote. “Makes no sense.” The post was a response to a Tesla fan account who asked whether there was any reason to use block instead of mute.

Regarded as a safety feature by many users, the suggestion that block could be going the way of the service’s old verification system was greeted with backlash from concerned users, TechCrunch reported.

“Twitter gives people a variety of tools to control their experience, including blocking,” the company writes on its help page. “Blocking helps people in restricting specific accounts from contacting them, seeing their Tweets, and following them. If you have been blocked by another account on Twitter, you can still block other accounts (including any that have blocked you).”

TechCrunch also reported that while Mute may still remain, the features are not the same. Block restricts fellow users from interacting with, viewing, and following an account. Mute simply hides your posts from their stream. Users are not made aware that they have been muted. Musk adds that the block feature will remain for direct messages.

Blocking has become an essential feature for many users, as they’ve seen an uptick in spam replies on their timeline. Earlier backlash also found some users blocking X Blue/Twitter Premium accounts, as the feature began to prioritize their responses over non-paying users. Many public figures have also relied on the feature as a method of removing harassment from their feed.

CNBC reported the users of X, formerly known as Twitter, will no longer be able to block comments from unwanted followers, according to a post by X owner Elon Musk on Friday, eliminating what’s long been viewed as a key safety feature. Blocking will only be available for direct messages, he said.

CNBC posted a screenshot between @teslaownersSV and @elonmusk, in which Mr. Musk stated that “Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs”.

The response had a “Readers Added Context” added to it: If the ability to block users was to be removed, X would be in violation of the policies of the App Store as well as the Google Play Store. Potentially, this could lead to X being removed from these platforms. There are no such policies for the web-app however.”

According to CNBC, Louis Jones, a longtime media and advertising executive who now works at the Brand Safety Institute, said Musk’s latest plan is very concerning as users could be inundated with spam, threats, and other harmful content.

Musk’s “lax approach to free speech,” is likely to have a “double effect,” making bullying more common on the platform and inhibiting free speech by those users who are targets of bullies and predators, Jones wrote in an email to CNBC. “It’s a downward spiral that cannot be good for the long term success of X.”

Personally, I’ve grown tired of what I see on the X desktop app. It appears that Elon Musk could take away the block feature from the web interface. However, if he tries to do that with the app, it will likely mean his X platform will disappear from the Apple Store and Google Play Store.

Twitter Will Lose Bird Logo In Brand Overhaul

Twitter,

Twitter owner Elon Musk said overnight Sunday that his social media platform will retire its widely recognized blue bird logo, and eventually the Twitter name, as part of his relentless effort to overhaul the company, The Washington Post reported.

Amid a series of tweets asking users whether the brand should change its default color from blue to black or white, Musk added: “Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”

According to The Washington Post, Musk said he would replace the famed bird with an “X’, which would match his early payment processing company X.com and the recently named parent company of Twitter, X Holdings. Musk has spoken repeatedly of his hopes to make Twitter an “everything app” that would include a payment system as well as communications.

Later on Sunday, he tweeted the the interim logo “goes live later today.”

Musk’s announcement caught Twitter employees as well as users by surprise. At midday, the company’s webpage on branding still declared: “Our logo is our most recognizable asset. That’s why we’re so protective of it.”

NPR reported that Musk hinted at the change as early as October of last year when he was days away from officially owning the company. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he said on Twitter.

Musk’s vision for an “everything app”, NPR reported, has been compared to platforms like the ubiquitous WeChat app in China.

According to NPR, for years, the billionaire has been known for having an affinity for the letter X – though he has shared little explanation as to why.

In one of his earliest ventures, Musk called his online bank X.com. That name was later dropped when the platform merged with a competitor to become PayPal. “X” is already the name of Tesla’s third electric car model, which debuted in 2015. Musk’s spaceflight company is also widely referred to as SpaceX. And in 2020, Musk and his then-partner, the Canadian musician Grimes, named their youngest son “X Æ A-12.”

Engadget reported that Elon Musk’s recently-announced AI venture is called xAI. And Twitter’s holding company was renamed to X Corp in April. Musk also talked about how X would help Twitter become an “everything app.” Though Musk has offered few specifics on this vision, many believe he’s referencing apps like WeChat, the most popular app in China that people use for a host of everyday activities like payments and shopping, in addition to social networking.

According to Engadget, officially abandoning the Twitter brand could be a risky move for Musk. The company is already facing an advertising exodus that’s resulted in a loss of more than half of the company’s ad revenue. A rebrand could further alienate advertisers.

In my opinion, changing the brand from a blue bird logo to a X will do little other than to temporarily confuse people who maybe haven’t logged into Twitter for a while. What Twitter really needs is more moderators to make the site welcoming to the marginalized people who are still using the service.

NOTE: The X at the top of this blog post is not the official one that Elon Musk will, eventually, reveal.

Twitter Limits Number of Direct Messages For Unverified Users

Twitter,

Twitter announced that it is limiting the number of daily direct messages unverified users can send in an effort its says reduces spam, NBC News reported.

The change went into effect Friday, according to a message on the Help Center. To increase the number of daily messages allowed, the social media company is prodding users to subscribe to Twitter Blue, a subscription service the company launched last year.

@TwitterSupport tweeted: “We’ll soon be implementing some changes in our efforts to reduce spam in Direct Messages. Unverified accounts will have daily limits on the number of DMs they can send. Subscribe today to send more messages: twitter.com/i/twitter_blue…”

PCMag reported that Twitter did not specify what the daily limit is, but in a support document, the company says it’s imposing the restriction to help the bird site cut down on spam.

Still, setting a cap on direct messages also looks like an attempt to push users into paying for Twitter Blue, which starts at $8 per month and offers several premium features, including the verified blue checkmark. Last week, Twitter’s owner Elon Musk conceded the company continues to bleed cash due to advertising revenue dropping by 50%, PCMag reported.

According to PCMag, some Twitter users are already blasting Twitter for imposing restrictions on direct messages. That’s because it looks like verified users paying for Twitter Blue can still send as many DMs as they want – whether it be legitimate messages or spam.

Engadget reported that Twitter has again made its platform a little less useable for people who choose not to pay for a Blue subscription.

According to Engadget, Elon Musk tweeted this month that Twitter is suffering from an ongoing negative cash flow, because it’s advertising revenue has dropped by 50 percent. Even if money from subscriptions can’t make up for that, it’s still money in the company’s pocket.

The Hill reported that Twitter’s move to limit the number of direct messages a user can send has come under criticism for punishing users that do not pay for Twitter Blue, the site’s premium subscription service. Blue subscribers would not have a limit on direct messages.

According to The Hill, the policy change comes weeks after Twitter announced that non-paying users would have the number of posts they can see per day limited. That change was sparked by technological limitations, Twitter owner Elon Musk said.

In addition, The Hill reported that the Twitter laid off a majority of its staff and has reportedly stopped paying rent at its office spaces. Many advertisers left Twitter after Musk took over the platform and removed the bans of the content creators who were nixed from the platform in previous years.

Personally, I’ve grown really tired of Twitter. I don’t see why Elon Musk thinks that strongly pushing people to buy Twitter Blue will solve all of the company’s financial problems. In my opinion, the choices Mr. Musk has made since he bought Twitter appear to be haphazardly chosen.