The Twitter logo is seen on a mobile device in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland on October 30, 2022. Twitter is losing its most active users according to research by Reuters. Despite the most influential tweets accounting for only 10 percent of monthly users, they are collectively responsible for 90 percent of all tweets and about half of the company’s revenue.
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The advertising giant Interpublic Group has recommended that its agency clients IPG Media Brands suspend all paid advertising on Twitter for at least a week following Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media network.
According to a person familiar with the matter, the firm is telling its customers — who can independently choose to continue advertising on Twitter — to wait for clarity on the social network’s plans for trust and security and to see if Musk will be able to prevent Twitter from becoming, as he called it, a “free-for-all inferno.”
Some of the agency’s clients include CVS Pharmacy, Nintendo AND Unilever. Those companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the recommendation.
Morning Brew contributor Ryan Barwick first reported on the ad giant’s recommendation to IPG Media Brands clients, citing an e-mail sent by MAGNA, a media intelligence business that is part of the group.
MAGNA reportedly advised clients in that email that Twitter had not yet had direct and clear communications with each marketing agency and that “the current situation is unpredictable and chaotic, and bad actors and unsafe behavior thrive in such an environment “.
On Friday, the automaker GM told CNBC that it had temporarily suspended advertising on the service “to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership.”
The Twitter user experience is already undergoing significant changes just days after Musk took over.
By the time Musk closed the deal on Oct. 28, racist and other hateful tweets had begun to plague the social network at much higher levels than usual, according to research from the Network Infectious Research Institute and Dataminr, as reported by NPR. Bad actors on several other platforms, notably 4Chan, have encouraged other users to post and amplify racist epithets and other derogatory insults on Twitter, and the change has alienated some famous users and inspired an outcry from NBA star, LeBron James.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of security, has tweeted several threads discussing how the company is combating this. Monday, Roth wrote on Twitter“We’ve made measurable progress, removing more than 1,500 accounts and reducing impressions on this content to almost zero.”
Last week, Musk wrote that Twitter would “form a content moderation council with very diverse perspectives” and promised it would not make “any major content decisions or account resets” before the council meets.
While he has not yet disclosed whether such a council has been created, Twitter recently restored all functionality to the account of a previously restricted user, Mark Finchem, who is the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona.
Finchem personally appealed to Musk for help in a tweet, and Musk said in a Twitter response that he was “looking into” the matter. Finchem has been a prominent 2020 election naysayer and an Arizona state legislator. The politician has been severely criticized for sharing anti-Semitic memes and plots on Twitter.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
