The Tesla chief's $44-billion deal to buy the global
messaging platform must still get the backing of shareholders and regulators,
but he has voiced enthusiasm for dialing back content moderation to a legal
minimum and no longer banning people for using the platform to instigate
real-world harm.
"Your brand risks association with a platform
amplifying hate, extremism, health misinformation, and conspiracy
theorists," said an open letter signed by more than two dozen groups
including Media Matters, Access Now, and Ultraviolet.
"Under Musk's management, Twitter risks becoming a
cesspool of misinformation, with your brand attached."
The groups urged advertisers to require that Twitter
maintain its content moderation policies as a non-negotiable term of doing
business with the platform.
Twitter makes most of its revenue from ads, and that could
be jeopardised by advertisers' reaction to content posted on the platform, the
San Francisco-based tech firm said in a filing with US regulators.
Ad revenue at Twitter increased 16 percent to $1.2 billion
in the recently ended quarter, while revenue from subscriptions and other means
decreased to $94.4 million, the company said in the filing.
While Musk has not revealed nitty-gritty details of how he
would run the business side of Twitter, he has expressed a preference for
making money from subscriptions.
Analysts doubt that Twitter users would flock to pay for
premium content or features such as retweeting posts when social media
platforms such as Facebook are free of charge.
As of the end of March, an average 229 million people used
Twitter daily, an increase of nearly 16 percent from the first three months of
last year, Twitter said in the filing.
The user growth was driven in part by the war in Ukraine,
with people using the service to find news and support, the company told
regulators.
"We believe that our long-term success depends on our
ability to improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter," the
company said in the filing.
Efforts toward that goal include fighting abuse, harassment,
spam and "malicious automation," or when software instead of people
manages accounts, Twitter told regulators.
Musk has said he would make fighting such automated
"bots" at Twitter a priority.
Twitter estimated that false or spam accounts made up less
than five percent of its daily active users in the first quarter of this year,
the filing said.