Only if ill-intended parties pressure those advertisers and effectively threaten them with that bad publicity for sticking around. It changes the game when there is coercion by third parties who are more than happy to see Twitter collapse if it isn't governed by their desired policies and worldviews.
If Twitter becomes (even more) a platform for hate (or at least "highly militant") speech, placing ads on Twitter, especially close to said hate speech becomes bad publicity, regardless of third parties. If you ware placing an ad for a mattress or a family movie, would you like it to be seen by people who are in the middle of a flamewar?
I don't presume to be an expert on how reader sentiment colors an ad view. But it would surprise me if it had as big an impact as people claim, or if people actually think the advertiser is picking a side or condoning bigotry, for example. We are used to seeing unfitting advertising strewn across the web, for better or worse, without correlating it with the subject material of the page. It would at worst devalue the ad space for being poorly targeted.
Furthermore, you would need to supply evidence that hate speech is more prevalent instead of merely fearmongering that it is allowing such.
> I don't presume to be an expert on how reader sentiment colors an ad view. But it would surprise me if it had as big an impact as people claim, or if people actually think the advertiser is picking a side or condoning bigotry, for example. We are used to seeing unfitting advertising strewn across the web, for better or worse, without correlating it with the subject material of the page.
That's entirely possible. I'm certain that big brands know better than me.
> It would at worst devalue the ad space for being poorly targeted.
Isn't this kinda synonymous with what I was claiming? Or are you saying that big ad spenders would come back but only if Twitter lowered its pricing? It's pretty clear that Twitter will do the latter, so we'll see about the impact.
> Furthermore, you would need to supply evidence that hate speech is more prevalent instead of merely fearmongering that it is allowing such.
And yet it has happened with great regularity. YouTube alone has been the site of numerous such advertiser withdrawals, so much so that its users coined a name for them, 'Adpocalypses'. It is often journalistic enterprises who see fit to gin up the severity of the content and to target any advertiser for coercion whose ad appears on a given 'problematic' video.
