Twitter executive calling Elon Musk mentally handicapped
(this post title could be seen as slightly sensationalist - but then, perhaps so could the entire Project Veritas campaign)<p>There&#x27;s an interesting tidbit in this video which I think accurately reveals the top-level monetization strategy that proponents of &quot;Twitter free speech edition&quot; have in mind.<p>Essentially the thinking is that the limited margins Twitter operates with are in fact partly&#x2F;largely due to content restriction policies, and that by removing these restrictions, profitability will increase.<p>That&#x27;s likely based on two intuition-based (rather than evidence-based) ideas: one, that there is a staffing cost involved in content restriction, and two, that social media competitors which are perceived as having lax-or-ineffective content policies appear to be more profitable.<p>Twitter themselves likely have the statistics to know for certain, but I&#x27;d guess that the staffing costs for content moderation aren&#x27;t a major overall factor for the business.  Their latest earnings report[1] -- in which I think &quot;General and Administrative&quot; probably includes such costs -- would seem to back that up.<p>Removing content moderation could conceivably &quot;increase engagement&quot; short term (due to fraught and problematic interactions on the platform) and <i>maybe</i> some of that could lead to increased advertising revenue.  But advertisers don&#x27;t like to see their brands associated with problematic environments -- note that as of May 2022, Truth Social has not secured any advertising partners[2][3] -- so it&#x27;s unclear whether that would convert into revenue, and it would introduce community risk.<p>I also think that the reason other platforms may be more profitable in terms of revenue-per-user is not due to content moderation or the way that their users interact, but instead due to the granularity of information that the platforms hold about each user.  The more they know, the more they can sell to advertisers.  I don&#x27;t like that business model personally, but I do believe that it&#x27;s a more reasonable explanation for the revenue-per-user differential.<p>Overall my sense is that the situation seems like a way to create significant gravity to draw in far-right and free-speech advocates in an attempt to topple what has - for all its&#x27; faults - generally been a progressive institution.<p>Open question: perhaps Twitter themselves have already run data science experiments regarding community sustainability and advertising performance in the absence of content moderation?  At a distance, in general, the company and board appear more prepared than the folks who are attempting to disrupt or wrestle control of the platform.<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;m not a shareholder in Twitter nor any other social media platforms.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;s22.q4cdn.com&#x2F;826641620&#x2F;files&#x2F;doc_financials&#x2F;2022&#x2F;q1&#x2F;Final-Q1’22-earnings-release.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;s22.q4cdn.com&#x2F;826641620&#x2F;files&#x2F;doc_financials&#x2F;2022&#x2F;q1...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Truth_Social#Revenue" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Truth_Social#Revenue</a><p>[3] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedrum.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;22&#x2F;truth-social-what-do-advertisers-make-trump-s-new-social-platform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedrum.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;22&#x2F;truth-social-what-do...</a>