Musk is learning the lesson Google and Youtube learned years ago with the “adpocalypse”. If the whole house of cards depends on ad dollars you have to keep them happy.
Unless Musk is going to take X (Twitter) completely subscription only, or fund it exclusively out of his own pocket, he is not going to get that “anything I want goes” utopia he keeps crowing about.
That’s how newspapers got started - they were propaganda organs of the rich and existed exclusively to manipulate public opinion. Things really haven’t changed that much, but somewhere along the way people were tricked into paying for them.
Except that libel laws and regulations exist to regulate things like newspapers, not things like random comments by random users you may not even know is a bot account. At the very worst, they can only report on what people are saying and ignore the counterarguments, not present lies as truth. Not that it hasn’t been eroded, but it’s at least much more costly to attempt to use newspapers for disinformation.
Pretty sure Russia’s owners of Twitter really intend it just to be used as a propaganda backwagon platform, like China’s TikTok, so the funding does not need to be self-sufficient. As long as they get a critical userbase where they can move their propaganda, nerf the criticism, and can’t be taken down because of the ensuing backlash, that’s good enough for them.
Military contractors advertise on the London underground because MPs, MI5 and MI6 have plenty of staff who commute.
Plenty of public servants use social media.
In Scotland, Scottish Water (a publicly owned nationalised company) has to advertise.
It’s not necessarily about selling new products, but maintaining awareness and keeping up opinion.
It’s like Dell or HP advertising servers on YouTube. Is some guy watching YouTube videos going to go out and buy a server? Probably not. He might make purchasing decisions for his company, though.
Subliminal sentiment bending techniques? See positive money stuff in your feed, line goes up because you believe things are good and invest somewhere. Maybe not with them, but all lines end up lining their pockets. Except Nazis apparently. That’s a line too far.
Amateur Nazi Daily Vlog. Day 237: Another Fail at Drawing A Swastika. Practicing Roman Salute In The Bathroom. How I Spat On The Sidewalk Near A Restaurant With A Jewish Owner And Got Barked At By A Dog.
I’m not defending hitler. I’m saying even hitler didn’t chose the nazis over money. If Germany weren’t so broke from the great recession, hitler would have never come to power.
The real question is - who is amoral/cynical enough to have kept on advertising on twifter after the toxic owner showed his true colors with the policy regressions over a year ago already?
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