On Twitter, Marketers Need To Draw A Line In The Sand

(MENAFN- PRovoke) A little more than a week from now, twitter chief executive Elon Musk will appear at
the possible conference
in Miami, managed by
mma global , an organization that brings together marketers and tech providers. The event provides what may be the last chance for marketers to influence the platform's direction. They should make it clear that unless Musk addresses the proliferation of disinformation and hate speech unleashed in the wake of his takeover, advertising revenues will continue to decline.

To be fair, many marketers have already made it clear that their brand values are incompatible with Twitter's direction under Musk, who has
weakened moderation practices
and
reinstated accounts
that had been banned for violating the previous management's rules against hate speech. According to
research from pathmatics , 14 of the top 30 advertisers on Twitter stopped all advertising on the platform after Musk took over. Overall, spending by the top 30 companies fell 42% to an estimated $53.8 million for November and December combined.

But during an
interview
with Bloomberg in February, WPP chief executive Mark Read said that Twitter seemed "to be a lot more stable” than it had been in the early days of the Musk regime, and offered:“I think clients want to start to look at how they can come back onto Twitter.”

If that's the case, Read and the clients he is talking to need to take a closer look at the events of the past couple of weeks, which have underscored just how unstable - in terms of content and policy, if not in terms of technology - Twitter has become. In terms of brand safety (protecting brands from association with hate speech and disinformation) there is little question that the platform is
getting worse .

Twitter policy on any given day seems to be dependent on the whims and grievances of its owner, and it is clear both from his own tweets and his intervention to denigrate and punish individual Twitter users that the platform has no rules that can be relied upon from day to day; everything is subject to Musk's adolescent level impulse control.

In short, Twitter has turned into Truth Social without the integrity - because at least the Trump-run platform is upfront and clear about its political agenda.

Making room for disinformation

In March,
npr reported
that Twitter's public relations [email protected] address, which has not responded to media inquiries at all since the PR department was decimated in the wake of the takeover, would now“automatically reply to journalists' inquiries with a single poop emoji,” - something confirmed by Musk himself
in a tweet .

Leaving aside what this says about Musk's view of public relations (more on that topic later) this is also a statement about his view of mainstream media. He seems intent on delegitimizing real journalism even as he amplifies misinformation and promotes conspiracy theories.

In the past week, the platform has made two decisions that ought to set alarm bells ringing. The first involved the decision to strip The New York Times - and only The New York Times - of its blue check mark, which in the past has been an indicator of“verified” status. The second involved the decision to identify NPR as“state owned media” in a blatant contradiction of Twitter's own published policy at the time.

Both were clearly capricious choices - almost certainly by Musk himself - targeting media outlets that offended him personally, and both were clearly attempts to delegitimize legitimate media organizations. As such, both decisions further the cause of those who wish to use Twitter to promote disinformation and to ferment right-wing hate.

The New York Times fiasco was the culmination (or, more likely, not) of several weeks during which the future of the blue check mark was perhaps the most discussed topic on the platform.

Musk had first tried to sell blue check marks, which had previously denoted verification (meaning that those who displayed them were who they claimed to be, and were in some way significant, because of their qualifications or their follower numbers). The result was that check marks were bought primarily by Musk's right wing fanboys, or by disinformation agencies prepared to pay for legitimacy they would never get on merit.

Then Musk announced that the legacy (read, legitimate) check marks would be taken away on April 1, and only paid check marks would remain. Those who bought check marks would see their posts boosted (again, regardless of accuracy or merit). Many of those with legacy check marks said they would not be paying to keep the checks, either on principle (they would not pay for creating the content Twitter needs to remain relevant) or for pragmatic reasons (they did not wish to be perceived as in any way similar to those who were buying blue check marks).

The Times was one of the first organizations to make it clear that they would not be paying - and when April 1 came around, the Times was one of the very few legacy verified accounts to lose its check mark, even though Musk
did not follow through
on his pledge to remove all such checks. With a
handful
of tweets
disparaging the Times, Musk made it clear that the publication had been singled out basically for refusing to play ball.

As for NPR, Twitter added a "state-affiliated media" tag to the broadcaster's main account on Tuesday, applying the same label to the nonprofit media company that Twitter uses to designate official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China.

As the organization points out:“NPR operates independently of the US government... NPR gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.”

Twitter's own policy describes state-affiliated media as "outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content” and until Tuesday, the social media company
also explained that
“state-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."

Responding to a tweet about the change,
musk posted :
"Seems accurate," which would appear to imply that he approved the change, elevating his personal desire to troll above any coherent company position - precisely the kind of behavior, in other words, that ought to alarm anyone hoping that Twitter will behave responsibly or be guided by policy and principle rather than poor impulse control.

A torrent of hate

In the wake of the takeover, Musk pledged that Twitter would not become“a free for all hellscape .” But the data suggest that it has become precisely that, with dramatic increases in hate speech against almost every marginalized group - some of it coming directly from Musk's own account.

In December,
the new york times reported
on research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and others, which found that before the acquisition, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the acquisition, they jumped to 3,876 times a day. Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before the takeover, and 3,964 times a day after.

Two weeks ago, more evidence emerged that Twitter has become more and more toxic since the takeover, raising fears that it is no longer a safe place for brands to market themselves. The
Institute for Strategic Dialogue, for example, found that incidents of anti-Semitic speech in the app have risen sharply since Musk took over.

As reported by
the washington post ,“The study, which used machine-learning tools to identify likely antisemitic tweets, found that the average weekly number of such posts 'more than doubled after Musk's acquisition' - a trend that has held in the months after Musk took over.” As
an article in social media today
points out, this“makes some sense. Musk has overseen the
reinstatement of over 60,000 Twitter accounts
that had previously been banned, many for hate speech violations, and... many of these accounts have resumed their previous tweeting habits, sharing hate speech, misinformation, etc.”

Another recent
report in the post
suggested that“Twitter is amplifying hate speech in its 'For You' timeline,” the result of an algorithm“that is supposed to show users more of what they want.” (Based on my own experience, I can say that the abundance of hate speech in the 'For You' tab also shows many users more of what they very much don't want).

According to the Post's analysis of Twitter's recommendation algorithm,“accounts that followed 'extremists' - hate-promoting accounts identified in a list provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center - were subjected to a mix of other racist and incendiary speech.... In one instance, after an account created by The Post followed dozens of others labeled as extremist, Twitter inserted a quote and a portrait of Adolf Hitler - from a user the account did not follow - into its timeline.”

Just two weeks ago, in fact, Twitter confirmed that it would be relaxing its already flaccid moderation rules to allow what it calls“non-toxic slurs.” In the absence of a coherent explanation of that Orwellian formulation from the company itself, I can come up with nothing better than
this, from thom dunn ,“Unlike hate speech, which is objectively bad, these non-toxic slurs are neither hateful, nor acts of speech, but rather, umm, derogatory insults aimed at a particular group of people, I guess. Which is different, you see. Because they're non-toxic.”

Overall,
the best summary
of the platform's recent activities comes from Techcrunch senior reporter Natasha Lomas:“Since
Musk took over
he has set about dismantling everything that made Twitter valuable - making it his mission to drive out expertise, scare away celebrities, bully reporters and - on the flip side - reward the bad actors, spammers and sycophants who thrive in the opposite environment: An information vacuum.”

Lomas expressed concern that Musk was“building a chaos machine by removing a source of valuable information from our connected world... and replacing that with a place of parody that rewards insincerity, time-wasting and the worst forms of communication in order to degrade the better half.” Her conclusion:“That our system allows wealth to be turned into a weapon to nuke things of broad societal value is one hard lesson we should take away from the wreckage.”

Marketers need to ask themselves whether this is something they want to support.

A toxic environment

“No amount of shiny Super Bowl commercials can make up for paying to place ads next to tweets by neo-Nazis and white supremacists,”said
nicole gill , executive director of Accountable Tech,
reacting to research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, released in February.“Elon Musk has made it clear that he will stop at nothing for clicks and profit - and companies that continue to play his game are only hurting their own brand and bottom line. It's time for companies to stop funding Musk's toxic Twitter.”

To be fair, many leading marketers already understand what Twitter has become and what it means for their brands. With the Possible conference just around the corner, a
semafor article
reported on a private email thread among MMA Global board members.

“For many communities, his willingness to leverage success and personal financial resources to further an agenda under the guise of freedom of speech is perpetuating racism resulting [in] direct threats to their communities and a potential for brand safety compromise we should all be concerned about,” wrote McDonald's chief marketing and customer experience officer Tariq Hassan.
“All of us who lead our brand's investments across platforms were required to navigate a situation post-acquisition that objectively can only be characterized as ranging from chaos to moments of irresponsibility.”

Colgate-Palmolive's VP and general manager of consumer experience and growth Diana Haussling added:“While I am a huge supporter of free speech and enterprise we cannot ignore the impact of such hate speech. I especially can't ignore it as a black woman,” she wrote.

Others, including Kristi Argyilan,
senior VP of retail media at the grocery giant Albertsons, questioned whether the decision to invite Musk was, in itself, a stain on the organization's reputation.

From a public relations perspective, it must be clear that Twitter's descent into unchecked racist, sexist and homophobic abuse makes it incompatible with the brand values of pretty much every major company in the world. Indeed, Richard Edelman, CEO of the world's largest PR agency,
spoke out on this issue
at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, suggesting that businesses should“deprive [social media] platforms that spread disinformation of oxygen. Stop advertising. Pull your promotion money.”

Musk's response was characteristically juvenile:“Edelman is a despicable human being - his job is literally being a professional liar!” (It's worth noting that most of what Edelman does is marketing PR, for companies and brands including Unilever, AstraZeneca, Barilla, Vaseline, Papa John's, Sanofi, Xbox, and EY. If this reflects Musk's view of marketers, it's a little odd that he even wants them on his platform.)

Again, the ad hominem attack and the adolescent tone should be a clue that Musk is incapable of reining in his worst impulses. The chances that he will create a stable environment for brands, or address the pandemic of disinformation, or do anything to reduce hate speech are vanishingly small. Indeed, the proliferation of disinformation and hate speech appears to have been (under the guise of“free speech”) the entire reason for his investment in Twitter.

Nevertheless, the Possible conference presents marketers with an opportunity - perhaps their final opportunity - to urge changes that would make Twitter into a more hygienic platform for their brands.

They should call for clearer, fairer policies that are enforced consistently rather than capriciously.

They should call for significant reductions in hate speech, as measured by credible third parties, not Twitter's own dubious metrics.

They should call for algorithms that promote factual, clearly-sourced information over disinformation and conspiracy theories.

They should call for a verification system that renders impersonation (of brands and individuals) almost impossible.

And they should insist on mechanisms that prevent their branded content from appearing anywhere near racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-trans content.

Then they should let Musk know that if he can implement these policies consistently over a six month period, Twitter will have earned their consideration. I don't believe for a second that he is capable of operating his company in this way - but it's the only way in which Twitter can become a safe place for brands to operate.

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