Twitter Reportedly Adding New Ad Placement Controls

Twitter told advertisers this week that it would roll out controls preventing their ads from appearing above or below tweets containing certain keywords, Reuters has reported(Opens in a new window).

The controls come in the wake of a report by hate speech researchers that revealed anti-Black, homophobic, and antisemitic tweets significantly jumped in the weeks after billionaire Elon Musk purchased Twitter in October. 

The reported rise in hate speech comes at the same time as Musk has reinstated several banned or suspended accounts, including that of former President Donald J. Trump. The moves by the self-declared free speech absolutist have prompted advertisers to remove their ads en masse; according to a Media Matters report(Opens in a new window), Twitter has seen at least half of its top 100 advertisers pull ads in less than a month. Those companies, which have spent $2 billion on ads since 2020, include Chevrolet, Ford, Chipotle, and Jeep.

According to Reuters, a Twitter representative said on a call with an advertising industry group that the site was considering bringing its third-party content moderators in-house. The move, the representative allegedly said, would allow Twitter to invest more in content moderation for non-English languages. 

Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, who replaced Yoel Roth, also told Reuters that the social media site would rely more heavily on automated content moderation(Opens in a new window), and added that Twitter’s layoffs did not ‘significantly’ hurt its moderation team and those working on child safety.

The company makes a significant amount of its revenue from advertising. As Platformer reports(Opens in a new window), Twitter’s ad revenue in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) has dropped 15% in 2022, and weekly bookings are down 49%. 

Musk has also scrambled to appease brands by offering generous incentives to advertise on the site. In one email sent to advertising agencies, seen and reported(Opens in a new window) by the Financial Times, Twitter announced it would award advertisers who spend between $500,000 and $1 million with additional impressions worth the same amount. It’s been reported that Twitter must service(Opens in a new window) at least $1 billion of interest this year after Musk took on billions of debt to complete the purchase.

The company has undergone a shift in its hate speech policy since Musk became CEO. In November, the entrepreneur said(Opens in a new window) that all tweets would be permitted on the site as long as they were legal. Negative/hate tweets, however, would be “max deboosted & demonetized,” meaning that such tweets would be hidden from timeline feeds and trending sections unless specifically sought out by users. It’s unclear if these changes have been implemented.