Twitter to introduce new controls for ad placements next week: Report

Social media company Twitter has said that it will soon bring new controls to allow advertisers to prevent their ads from appearing above or below tweets with certain keywords. 

The company said that the new controls are part of Twitter's effort to lure back advertisers that have pulled ads off the platform since Elon Musk took over in October, as per a Reuters report.

The announcement came amid reports from civil rights groups that hate speech has risen since the acquisition and after several banned or suspended accounts were reinstated.

Twitter earns nearly 90% of its revenue from selling digital ads. Musk recently attributed a “massive drop in revenue” to civil rights organisations that have pressured brands to pause their Twitter ads.

A Twitter representative said in a call on Thursday with an advertising industry group that the platform was considering bringing its content moderators, many of whom are contracted through third-party vendors, in-house, according to a source familiar with the remarks.

The Twitter representative said that bringing content moderators in-house would allow the platform to invest more in moderation for non-English languages, according to the source.

The comments come after Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, told Reuters that the platform would lean more heavily on automated content moderation. Irwin also said that Twitter’s recent layoffs, which cut 50% of staff, did not significantly hurt its moderation team and those working on critical areas like child safety.

The email to advertisers on Thursday, as reviewed by Reuters, said that a revamped version of Twitter’s subscription service called Twitter Blue would begin rolling out on Friday.

“The subscription will allow accounts to receive a verified check mark. Accounts for individuals will get a blue check, while gold and grey check marks will denote business and government accounts,” according to the email, which added that the “subscription price will be $7 per month on the web and $11 per month on Apple devices”.

Twitter also told advertisers that it removed ads from profiles mentioned in a Washington Post article earlier this week, which reported that ads had appeared on the Twitter accounts of white nationalists. For example, Snap Inc, which owns photo messaging app Snapchat, has paused its advertising on Twitter while it investigates the issue, a spokesperson told Reuters.

The accounts were not part of “amnesty reinstatements”, Twitter’s email said, referring to Musk’s tweet last month that Twitter would reinstate suspended accounts that have not broken the law.

“We will not be reinstating bad actors, spam accounts and users that engaged in criminal/illegal activity,” it noted.

Meanwhile, Musk on Friday announced that users will be able to see the view count of tweets in a few weeks. “Tweets will show view count in a few weeks, just like videos do. Twitter is much more alive than people think,” he tweeted.