Yesterday, I resolved to go a full day without writing about the train wreck next to a dumpster fire that is Twitter. And I while I did manage to do that, a lot happened while I was off covering other things.
Let’s start with this Forbes article where Elon Musk is trying to get advertisers back onto the platform:
Elon Musk’s tumultuous five-week tenure as Twitter CEO continued to take a strange path Thursday, with the world’s wealthiest man pleading for users to post more on the social media site as the firm reportedly dangled a lucrative offer to advertisers who drive a majority of the company’s revenue but have soured on Musk’s vision for Twitter.
Companies who spend more than $500,000 on Twitter ads will receive a 100% match on their spending in equivalent marketing value up to $1 million, according to an email sent to advertisers viewed by the Wall Street Journal.
It’s “the most aggressive ad spend incentive” ever, according to an internal message from a Twitter executive viewed by Platformer editor Zoe Schiffer, explaining it’s intended to “make it worth it to get any paused advertisers to reactivate.”
It smells of desperation to me. And so does this:
Now why would he post this? I am guessing that he needs people actively Tweeting, and Tweeting a lot to convince advertisers to do ad buys as advertisers won’t go where the are no eyeballs to see their ads. That too sounds like desperation.
Elon really needs to wrap his head around why advertisers are fleeing the platform like passengers fleeing the Titanic. Let’s start with exhibit “a”:
WHEN ELON MUSK wanted to bring Donald Trump’s account back to Twitter, he turned to one of the platform’s most familiar features to legitimize the move—a poll.
A narrow 51.8 percent of his audience voted to “Reinstate former President Trump,” leading the billionaire CEO to reinstate the infamous account. A week later, Musk once again turned to a Twitter poll to ask his followers whether to jailbreak the hordes of accounts suspended for posting far-right content, Qanon conspiracy theories, and lies about the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic.
There’s just one problem, multiple former Twitter employees say. The social network’s polls are magnets for bots and other inauthentic accounts. They’re literally designed to be spammed and gamed.
“One of the first products I worked on was polls. And one of the big discussions was around the tradeoffs between integrity and privacy – keeping logs [or each user’s vote] or not. We landed on the side of privacy,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety who resigned this month, told Rolling Stone.
“Polls are more prone to manipulation than almost anything else [on Twitter]. It’s interesting, given his [Elon’s] use of polls,” he added. Several other ex-Twitter employees gave similar assessments.
So for a guy who raged against bots, he relies on something that is full of bots to make his decisions. That’s more than a bit “sus” to say the least.
This circus is clearly getting bigger every day.