X is left with advertisers pushing dubious cryptocurrency and AI 'undressing' apps, users say after Musk's outburst

AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 848 points – X is left with advertisers pushing dubious cryptocurrency and AI 'undressing' apps, users say after Musk's outburst
businessinsider.com
  • X users are complaining about an influx of low-quality ads promoting crypto scams and AI "undressing" apps.
  • The decline in reputable advertisers on X has made the platform more reliant on less reputable ad buyers.
  • The exodus of advertisers, partially due to Elon Musk's controversial behavior, has left X with a growing revenue gap.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/sbOxS

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You advertise to your audience. Ads targeting the perverse and the stupid seem perfectly suited to twitter.

You may not like it, but this is what peak advertising looks like. Add in some T-shirts with swastikas on them, and they've nailed their target demographic.

I've clicked a few "sources" from a dude I know on Facebook that constantly posts his crazy bullshit. Dick pill ads for days.

Meanwhile my Hulu ads are for Hers or Hims, I guess my VPN works

HIMS, HERS, and dating apps for days.

When in doubt bank on people not feeling they’re enough and lonely.

I recently got a fresh Hulu acct and it's funny watching them try to figure out what I "am" while they just cycle through the dating app ads.

One commercial will be a christian dating app, the next will be a black dating app, the next will be a latino dating app, the next a farmers dating app. It's hilarious and I'm not exaggerating at all. I'm sure if I started interacting with anything they'd start narrowing my demographics down but for now the algorithm seems to be trying a shotgun approach and it's a little bit amusing.

404 Media report[ed] last month that ads promoting "semen stealing" were showing up on the site.

Wait what now

I mean, where do you get your semen?

I make my own.

It's 9pm. Do you know where your semen is?

If I were someone with no tact and low-brow humor, I'd say it's in your mom's mouth. Fortunately I'm much better than that. So I'll just say it's slowly gathering in preparation for a pre-sleep release into a few tissues.

ETA: which I will douse in hot sauce before flushing down the toilet.

I got the rest from this guy named Ralph in an alley--stupid asshole didn't even charge me, he just told me to close my eyes and suck it out of a hose!

I wanted to see what kind of ads that might actually be since I have zero concept. I do not recommend typing "semen stealing" into Google innocently and hoping for an answer.

I'm going to have some weird ads now...

And yet you didn't share the info with us? Shame on you

If you don't want to search it up, here are the first 3 DuckDuckGo results for "semen stealing"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_fatherhood

https://news.yahoo.com/spurgling-stealing-sperm-pregnant-121820779.html

https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2022/01/10831906/baby-trapping-illegal

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

Forced fatherhood or imposed paternity, occurs when a man's semen is used, against his will or without his knowledge or consent, to inseminate a woman, it includes deception by a partner about their ability to get pregnant or use of contraceptives, birth control sabotage, and sexual assaults of males that result in pregnancy. "Sperm theft" (also known as "unauthorized use of sperm", "spermjacking" or "spurgling" (a portmanteau of sperm and burgling), refers to a specific form of forced fatherhood where a males semen is collected without his consent. Although the term uses the word "theft", it more closely falls under a state of fraud or breach of contract. Stealing of sperm in itself without using it for successful insemination is not illegal and is difficult to prove. It usually has no bearing on issues like child support.

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I saw... that. But what could someone advertise about it! And that's a curiosity those links don't answer...

I like how you're just adbaiting us at this point

Yea this guy is the hero of the thread, I would have just not bothered with the article if it wasn't for you pointing that line out

Couldn't find that username or email is my favourite person!

Yep, I’ve seen that, along with ads for “jack-off pants”:

Well he told advertisers to fuck off so they did.

To me as an average Joe it seems pretty dumb to tell your advertisers to fuck off when they provide a big chunk of your income but hey, I'm not a stable genius billionaire so I just don't get Elon's 5D chess moves. Right?

What's much more interesting to me is when Facebook and YouTube told advertiser's to fuck off? Because it's the exact same type of ads but people pretend they see Disney and coca cola ads on everything except twitter..

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I'm calling it now. Even if his aim was to not destroy Twitter from the inside, he will absolutely say that was his goal when it eventually happens.

People like this never, pathologically, ever, ever admit making a mistake.

He has too much money to give a shit, he lost more money than anyone has literally ever on this deal and he still has more money than almost anyone who's ever lived. Only way he stops being like this is if he drops dead from the inevitable overdose he's queuing up for himself

Eh most of that "money" is actually leveraged Tesla shares. Tesla shares that are overvalued. If he runs Tesla into the ground it's not actually implausible he goes bankrupt.

Of course for the billionaires "going bankrupt" isn't the same as it is for you an me. He'll still live a life of luxury we can't even imagine, he just won't control as much of the economy as he does now. And he can always scam his true believers out of some money by creating a startup promising to to build robot dolphins or whatever (it doesn't matter he's a hype man) which he'll never deliver and idiots will throw money at him.

Even if his aim was to not destroy Twitter from the inside, he will absolutely say that was his goal when it eventually happens.

Could that open him up to lawsuits from investors?

His investors wanted this. Twitter was a huge threat to a few oil rich autocratic regimes.

ooh, juicy accusation

Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Larry Ellison (Oracle) were the biggest backers in the buy out deal. Saudi Arabia’s princes want to keep a tight control on information - remember how they butchered Khashoggi? With Qatar it was probably to prevent any slave labor deaths associated with FIFA from going viral. Larry Ellison probably just wanted all that juicy data, idk, he’s quiet but he gives a lot of money to right wing American causes.

he owns Twitter

I though Twitter is publicly traded and has stocks? That would mean that he definitely has a duty towards investors who bought the shares to lead the company in a responsible way, and if he claimed that he destroyed it on purpose, it should lead to a lawsuit from them. But I ain't no lawyer, only vaguely remember hearing something like that. Or does he own 100% of the shares himself and is the sole investor?

It used to be publicly traded, but it went private when he acquired it.

Which doesn't mean he doesn't answer to any investors anymore, of course. He got quite a lot of assistance with that acquisition.

Oh, I see. I guess that means there's basically no-one who can sue him, if there aren't any investors.

As long as he can repay any loans and stuff, then I suppose he can do whatever he wants with the company. If, however, he bancrupts it to the point of not being able to pay back anything the company owes, then he should be in trouble. I hope.

Weird, this week they’re also claiming that TwitX has 24 times the engaged users of YouTube.

Prime example of "source? trust me bro". Elon can make up whatever metrics he needs to, but it doesn't make the platform any better

Advertisers surely know he's full of crap, too. He can make up fake views, he could even have bots click on ads, but unless he's also going to fake being a customer it will all come out in metrics. Savvy advertisers track all of that. Clicks per display, sales per click.

I’m curious about what their definition of “engaged” is. I imagine most people don’t make comments on YouTube videos, but twitter’s main focus has always been posting and commenting on others’ posts.

Scrolling by a video without even looking at it counts, apparently.

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"The fact that X has made it abundantly clear that it has no desire to create a brand-safe environment has only solidified our recommendations to move to growing platforms with better opportunities for organic discovery," he added.

This is how you say "fuck you too" in corporatespeak

I would personally go with:

"Some may say that Mr. Musk was a visionary, and further to the road map laid out by Mr. Musk during the Dealbook Summit, our organization is happy to assist with bringing said business forecast into reality."

  • Past tense on visionary

  • brings up him telling companies to "fuck off"

  • rubs it in that his financial people have clearly told him that this is how Xitter goes belly-up, and that when he tries to fix it, he just makes it worse.

I don't use Twitter and my life is better off.

It's crazy, any time I open it up I see blatantly obvious rightwing trolls or even gore. My feed pre-Elon didn't look like that, I mostly followed infosec people but they've all gone elsewhere and now it seems I'm being served content that baits me into arguing or converts me.

Ten is a terrible site anyway.

Please don't associate Xitter with the ancient Romans. They never hurt you.

They never hurt you.

This heavily depends from which geographical region you're from. They were the champions of imperialist colonialism for a loooooong time.

Hell, I'd broaden it to the whole world because the Romans popularized Christianity, which pretty much immediately kicked off millennia of religious conflict. Christians vs "pagans" (which wasn't one single group), Christians vs Christians, Christians vs Jews, Christians vs Muslims, Christians vs all "pagans" in the world (and their history), Catholics vs Protestants, church vs science...

Maybe Christianity would have risen without the Romans, but it wouldn't have had such a powerful papacy without the Roman legacy. And as much as I hate religion, I have to admit it wasn't all bad; if it weren't for the clergy, even more Roman knowledge would have been lost and education in general through Europe would have been worse. Maybe. Islam did have Christianity beat for education and progression for a while, and the church did have a habit of condemning science that contradicted the idea that we were special in every single way.

People who seek power and authority will use whatever tools at their disposal. Christianity is a good tool because it is inherently monotheistic (leaving all the Trinitarian nonsense aside), thus making it authoritarian. One God. One mouthpiece. Christianity would have become dominant somewhere else and infected the world.

I don't disagree, I just don't think there would have been as strong of a central church authority because it wasn't grandfathered in as a former Roman institution with all the power and influence that came along with that.

Once the Roman emperors decided Rome was Christian, a lot of Europe was suddenly Christian. Iberia, everything west of the Rhine, the Balkans, Anatolia, and the western part of the Middle East. If Rome hadn't forced that, Christianity wouldn't have spread as quickly and might even today still be one of many different sects.

Islam might have spread through Europe instead of being stopped in Iberia and the Balkans. It's impossible to know what Europe would have done with Islam, but early Islam was a lot more tolerant of other religions and valued education, knowledge, and progress. We might not have settled in to some centuries of most people thinking humans had discovered everything there was to discover or physics being held back by people offended at the idea that the Earth isn't the centre of existence. Colonialism might have even been different because Islam didn't stamp out existing cultures like Christianity did (though again, who knows what it would have evolved into by the time people were figuring out how to navigate the oceans, because Rome also used to be like that).

Great, it has now been 0 days since I thought about The Roman Empire.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

The aqueduct.

Yes, they did give us that, that's true

And sanitation Yes, that too

The aqueduct I'll grant is one

thing the Romans may have done

And the roads, now they're all new

And the great wines too

Well, apart from the wines and fermentation,

And the canals for navigation

Public health for all the nation

Apart from those, which are a plus,

what have the Romans ever done for us?

I'm starting to think that telling your customers to "go fuck themselves" may not be a sound business decision.

Since when do "high quality ads" exist? I mean, the mentioning of "low quality ads" implies that those others might actually exist.

Probably meaning ads for real products and travels etc.

As a current Twitter user I would say there's actually a large void between normal ads and whatever the hell I'm getting served on that platform these days.

There's low quality ads, shit tier ads and then there's whatever Muskyboi is attracting these days.

This is the last ad that had me paying full attention when it first came on. It was ran during the football finals season and they made two cuts, one for NRL and one for AFL. https://youtu.be/gbMeKMkE_mk

Those YT "in video ads" on Internet Comment Etiquette is about as high quality as you can make it. I wouldn't want to skip Erik selling Nord VPN, Raycon, Nobleberry, or anything else he wants to make an ad for.

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Elon gets what Elon deserves

But he unfortunately also gets what he doesn't deserve, like billions of dollars

And attention. Can we finally stop talking about him? Who cares at this time.

AI undressing apps you say? AI's about to make that video of Elon telling advertisers to fuck off a lot more surprising.

“What’s that melting refrigerator? I thought this was an undressing app!”

"Oh, my God, that's disgusting! Software that makes naked pics online? Where? Where did they post those?"

I mean....youtube is the same tho. I constantly get ads for apps that are basically flat out saying you can use it to make porn of anyone you want. Not to meniton the constant scams. There is that big one that pops up all the time claiming you can get a online only, no experience necessary, data entry job for Disney starting at something crazy like $25 an hour.

Musk is shit, X is shit but....all of them allow these kinds of ads.

You should just block the ads. It's not that hard and certainly worth it.

Eh, i rarely use it on my phone so not really worth the time and effort.

It’s a couple clicks. I’d seriously recommend it because I’ve found that Google actually will improve their recommendations if you tell them stuff you’re not interested in.

Wait. That job posting is a scam?

Yep, money is too good to be true for a job like that for one thing but I saw someone talk about it and a few others like it. You go through all the steps, give them your personal information, and then you get dumped on a generic job seeking website and then get spammed to death for months.

$25 an hour is sadly not too good for any job in the US these days. $50k doesn't go that far anymore.

Define "the US" because 25 an hour is living a life of luxury in much of the US that's not a major city

$25/hr isn’t living a life of luxury anywhere. Not even in a town of 2,000 people.

What is that like 40, maybe 35k after taxes?

$52k before taxes, about $41k after. It's an ok wage a lot of places but I defniitely wouldn't call it a "life of luxury" anywhere in the U.S. and I'm from one of the LCOL places in the U.S., the midwest.

You definitely won't starve but you're also not going to retire early.

Most of us consider not living check to check as living a life of luxury.

$50k is still very much working class. Yeah you own a car but it's a 7yr old Nissan sedan, nothing luxurious about it. At $50k you're not missing that many paychecks before it becomes a very real issue I promise.

I was slightly exaggerating sure, but 25 an hour outside of a city is a lot of money.

$25/hr is barely a living wage.

Are you factoring in vehicle payments, maintenance, insurance and fuel?

A lot of people have a cheap transit option in the city.

Yes. When I lived out there I would've killed for 25 an hour. I was making 7.50 an hour and with a roommate I lived pretty okay. At 25 I could've lived alone and still saved

When was that?

Three or four years at this point, so technically not including some of the ridiculous inflation, but the cost of living in that area has barely increased. Rent is $900 on average there right now, so if you're pulling in 25 an hour you're making plenty to live alone relatively comfortably

Until you need a doctor and suddenly discover a lot of rural areas don't have any.

What's that you say? Advertisers took his advice at that event seriously?

We learned in D.A.R.E. that X is bad for you. Seems like X in its digital form is also bad for you and for its dealer.

I care just enough to say I don't care.

I was repeatedly called a GPT3 bot on Xitter. This was before it was even public.

There was a crazy guy on Reddit who was absolutely convinced I was a rogue AI. It was so bizarre.

Can you prove you AREN'T a rogue AI? :p

The best part was, just to see what he would do, I wrote his username and the date and time on a napkin and took a picture of it- blacking out part of my face to limit the doxing- and he claimed it was photoshopped. You can't win against crazy, but I was pretty amused.

He fully embraced a post-truth world! Assume EVERYTHING is a lie

Except the stuff he knows is true of course

Hmm last time I tried to do that, all I was able to do was show the selection process that required it was flawed and got admin access anyways.

Or maybe whoever was in the terminals was just fucking with me the whole time.

Either way, I'm still not sure I'm a person. Maybe I'm just a meat automation.

You admit you care, and that's the first step to curing your addiction.

How about we agree to call X/Twitter as Xitter. It avoids the confusion.

Nope. I'm calling it Twitter. If he says it's okay to deadname trans people on his platform, I'm going to deadname his platform.

I find it particularly funny to call it X(formerly twitter) every time I have to mention it.

Also kind of love how Dubious X is as a name cause I always think it's a porn site before my brain clicks

Fun fact, the greek far right, anticommunist group during WW2 and after were called "Χίτες"(Chites)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_X

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

The Organization X (Greek: Οργάνωσις Χ; commonly referred to simply as X ("Chi" in Greek), and members as Chites (Χίτες)) was a paramilitary right-wing anti-communist royalist organization set up in 1941 during the Axis occupation of Greece. Initially an anti-Axis resistance organization, it gradually shifted its focus towards anti-communism. In 1951, X was officially recognized as a National Organization of Internal Resistance by the Greek Ministry of National Defense. Following the end of the Axis occupation, it played an active role in the persecution of communists during the White Terror and various military operations of the Greek Civil War, most notably the Dekemvriana.

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I still use Twitter but I have no idea what the quality of ads is like since they're long blocked. I could well imagine that there is some absolute bottom of the barrel garbage and scams a plenty.

That's what happens when you cater to a bunch of right-wing extremists and literally tell mainstream advertisers to fuck off.

And it's only a matter of time until those AI undressing app get banned by law. Good.

Didnt Netflix just start doing ads on there again?

Hadn't heard that, do you have a source?

I'd be pretty surprised if most didn't start their ad buys again. Even if it's lower volume (and at discounts). As soon as everyone stops focusing on these things (after a month or whatever) things tend to go back to business as usual.

The article indicates they haven't yet, though.

Eh, maybe if their MAU wasn't just on a continual decline. It's just not sustainable, especially when so much of the MAU are bots.

Wish I could cancel our Netflix subscription for a second time, but fortunately/unfortunately we stopped giving them money when they announced they would fuck around with accounts shared within a family. Eat shit, Netflix

I can't with this guy anymore, I just can't.

Maybe one day he'll climb into his Telsa, hit the stage 69 autopilot button and fly back to Mars where his people are from

I have very little doubt that in the mind of Elon Musk the people who after all this are still using X-Twitter are lusers.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

They are also spreading rapidly across the internet, according to data from the social-media analysis firm Graphika, which warned such tools could be used for sextortion and targeted harassment campaigns.

Hamza Mudassir, a strategy consultant and lecturer at Cambridge University, noted that suspicious ads appear across all social-media platforms.

"However, I think the problem with X is that, because all of the large advertisers have effectively walked out, this is what you see in higher frequency, which basically produces a terrible time for genuine users on the platform," he told BI.

Since taking over the site, Musk has slashed X's content-moderation team and reinstated figures such as Alex Jones who was previously removed from the platform for abusive behavior, something that made advertisers distinctly uneasy even before the billionaire's recent controversies.

"The fact that X has made it abundantly clear that it has no desire to create a brand-safe environment has only solidified our recommendations to move to growing platforms with better opportunities for organic discovery," he added.

The Financial Times reported last month that X was attempting to offset the loss of companies like IBM and Walmart by appealing to smaller businesses and aiming to bring in $100 million in political ads during the 2024 election year.

The original article contains 756 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Haven't met the undressing bots yet. But my account somehow ended up in a bot list and I get @ by at least 3-5 crypto bots daily. Quite annoying.

  • The exodus of advertisers, partially due to Elon Musk's controversial behavior, has left X with a growing revenue gap.

The main reason Twitter has a revenue gap is that Musk saddled it with $13bn of debt with his leveraged buyout. The business isn't failing because of Musk's management since then, it's failing because that was the purpose derived from the purchase.

The thing is, Twitter is liable for that debt, and they continue to fall further into the red every time they fail to pay their bills and every time they lose advertisers because ad aggregation is their business. So the business is definitely being detrimentally affected by his leadership because he is directly responsible for the underwritten debt of $13bn and the $14 million+interest in unpaid bills, plus probably more than $500 million in unpaid severance pay. He's barely owned the company a year. And there are so many lawsuits that honestly he'll end up owing more just from that.

They're only liable for the debt so long as the business is operational, though. If the business folds, all the debt goes with it.

The point I'm making is that, while the decisions Musk has made since buying it have only made the business worse, ultimately the reason it's going to fail is the huge amount of debt, which is primarily from the leveraged buyout. If anything, Musk's antics are nothing but those of a clown trying to distract from and give plausible deniability against the real evil that's happening.

They're only liable for the debt from the buyout. The other stuff? We'll see what the courts rule. But on the other hand, that assumes the banks were in on it.