Users matter the most because if non-toxic users flee the platform, Twitter has no value to advertisers.
So first, users are one of the major levers to keep valuable advertisers happy -- not the only one, but also not the only significant one, and they are purely instrumental. Second, Twitter does not want a negative public perception, along the lines of cable news, or much worse, 4chan. The former loses you a subset of a subset of the market and is a constant PR/lobbying headache, the latter loses most medium to high value advertisers altogether and is an existential regulatory threat. In almost no way is the worry that the toxic environment would be a subjectively bad experience for users.
Before Parler was banned from the App store (and before it was re-instated after more moderation was added), its stated policy was roughly to moderate strictly to what's within the bounds of the law, albeit with some significant inconsistencies especially around pornography and nudity. I used it during this time, and it was extremely common to see a lot of seemingly intentionally hateful but legal use of the n-word, etc. P&G, Nestle, etc., don't want to associate their brands with an environment like that. Obviously Apple didn't either.
It's important to always keep these realities in mind for all corporate action. Take Jack Dorsey's bluesky initiative[1], which many viewed in purely ideological or technical terms. My personal opinion is that it was either a way to counter negative PR ("Twitter is a moderated node that's profitable, but technically you can choose another node that's toxic and unprofitable but with less moderation, and good luck with that...", where Twitter gains all the "free speech" PR benefit with none of the significant costs), or a low cost self-soothing action to assuage pangs of guilt for instituting some policies he didn't personally agree with, with the important part that it is designed with a hard constraint to do nothing to negatively affect profits. So it's just an escape hatch for PR or personal angst.
Somehow other websites with copious amounts of pornographic content, like twitter and reddit, get a pass on this "sketchy" characterization.
Maybe, but twitter and reddit are not among them. Both are known for hosting very extreme content.
But I think this is all a distraction from what I was trying to convey -- my point doesn't depend on getting to the bottom of what is meant by "sketchy". Just define X to be some kind of website that has extremely low value advertisers (scammers, etc.):
> [X] websites do have advertisers, just extremely low value ones. Twitter wants to maintain a pleasant environment for the medium to high value advertisers, [...]
Then I opened /wg/ and there were anime porn ads.
> We don't want our advertisements to be shown next to posts that do X, Y or Z
That's effectively, the same as
> We want to see our advertisements by A, B and C
Just give advertisers different options.
Further, Twitter advertisements aren't much different than billboards. Do you worry about the politics / optics of the drivers or even protesters beneath the the billboards in a city? No, of course not, you just want people to buy your products. Do people care, no.
It's all fake outrage, trust me people will still buy Coke or Pepsi even if someone sees something distasteful while doom scrolling.
In terms of general "toxicity" there's already blocking users, but allow users to "avoid topics" if they need their safe spaces. Then as a business, let users "pay to avoid topics" as it'll require some hand curation -- boom. More money for twitter, more users on the platform, everyone wins.
And if an advertiser pays a service that, for example, shows terrorist propaganda, then they could be seen as funding and supporting terrorism.
Better to not take the risk. This was another reason why the credit card companies and / or payment providers pulled out (hehe) of Pornhub; they did not verify the age or consent of the people involved, thus were the payment providers complicit in perpetuating this. It would have been morally unjust to keep funneling money into PH if they didn't do anything against them. Not that the payment processors can claim much moral high ground, generally speaking, but you know what I mean.
This is a PR problem and fixable.
Further, this is an issue with advertisers. As Elon is proposing, have people pay to get verified ($5 / year or something). Further, as I mentioned, you can "pay to avoid topics" (have users label / flag stuff they don't want in their topic, like they do now generally for breaking the rules) and advertisers can select topics to promote on AND topics to not promote next to.
The reality, is Twitter would then get a large segment of revenue outside of advertising AND advertisers would feel more confident -- boosting revenue from both sides.
> This was another reason why the credit card companies and / or payment providers pulled out (hehe) of Pornhub
This is different, the advertisers didn't pull out of Pornhub, payment processors did. Twitter could probably lose half it's advertisers short term, but if they grew the user base they'd make more money long-term. Advertisers buy eyes not virtues. Yes, a bad post next to an ad is somewhat damaging, when your choices are literally: Twitter, Google, Facebook; are you really going to cut one of your 3 choices? Not long-term.
From an advertiser perspective, if Twitter allows nazis, advertisers will be funding the distribution of nazi content — UI framing means nothing.
There's not a chart anywhere I can find that shows advertisers reducing their spending on youtube. I "articles" (potentially paid for advertisments) claiming that was happening; but as far as I'm aware, there's no evidence that it made a material difference.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/289658/youtube-global-ne...
Unfortunately, the data wasn't public during the controversy; so it's not really clear besides anecdotal virtue signaling by companies.
It's hard to explain how much you're understating the difficulty in doing this. It would likely require AGI to do this well. Until then, advertisers buy ads on entire platforms (like a given TV network), and they have to rely on the platform to ensure that the content is advertiser-friendly.
Hell, advertisers don't want their ads to be seen next to Elon's current Twitter feed ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517707521343082496 ), let alone what Twitter will look like in a year after everyone starts posting using the owner's timeline as example.
Looking back at Tumblr, I'd say that's not a rule.
You're basing your assumption that advertisers will be the main source of revenue in the future.
Twitter's true customers are its advertisers. It's who pays. And they are even less likely then the normal person to want an "everything that isn't illegal is allowed" approach. Advertisers don't want their ads seen next to hate speech and certain other types of speech.
It's been clear that Reddit and YouTube have been censoring at the behest of advertisers for years, and I don't think Twitter is or will be any different.