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.
> 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.