An increasing number of technical "glitches" are being reported by Twitter users in the wake of massive layoffs and resignations at the social media giant since billionaire Elon Musk took control of the company and this is causing some marketing agencies to rethink ad purchases on the platform.
"I've seen a lot of technical and ideological takes on Elon Twitter but wanted to share the marketing perspective," TuVH23, an anonymous user posting to the business blog Bind said this weekend.
"I had my team keep our campaigns live for two weeks post-takeover on the bet that efficiency would improve with fewer advertisers and the risks were managed and probably overblown," TuVH23 continued. "I was wrong and I think the things we saw in these last two weeks means many more advertisers will bail on the platform in the coming weeks [for non-ideological or virtue signaling reasons]."
The user, who could not be independently verified but claims to work for the financial services company Current, said they control about $750,000 in monthly advertising buys on the platform that will be paused due to a series of issues including glitches, losing account support staff at Twitter, and "brand safety."
Musk took over the platform two weeks ago and fired about half of the company, while many other employees resigned with the leadership change, NPR reported last week.
"I left because I no longer knew what I was staying for," Peter Clowes, a senior software engineer who resigned on Thursday, said in the NPR article. "Previously I was staying for the people, the vision, and of course the money [let's all be honest]. All of those were radically changed or uncertain."
On Sunday night, Forbes reported the platform's automated copyright violation detection system went down allowing some users to post full-length movies like "Hackers," and "Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift" in short, 2-minute posts.
According to the report, the posted movies went viral and had to be manually taken down instead of being automatically detected and removed.
"It should be fairly obvious to anyone what kind of liability it opens Twitter up to if their copyright system is non-functional, and its newly limited pool of workers are going to need to manually hunt down infringers," Forbes Senior Contributor Paul Tassi wrote Monday.
"Once media companies get wind of this, we could see Twitter hit with all sorts of DMCA claims and potential legal issues if they can't get a handle on this quickly," Tassi continued. "I'm picturing Disney content starting to be uploaded here and them going nuclear."
In a Nov. 14 report, Digiday, a digital marketing and advertising publication, reported that GroupM, the world's largest advertising agency, advised clients to reassess the "risks" of putting money into Twitter.
"Based on the news yesterday [Nov. 10] of additional senior management resignations from key posts, high profile examples of blue check abuse on corporate accounts, and the potential inability for Twitter to comply with their federal consent decree, GroupM's Twitter Risk Assessment is increased to a High-Risk rating for all tactics," a document from the agency reviewed by Digiday said.
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