The Tesla founder and Twitter owner's name change comes as the social media giant launches a major brand safety campaign for skittish advertisers.
A lawyer's allegedly Freudian slip, a humorous acceptance in court and then on Twitter, and Elon Musk has a new nickname: Mr. Tweet.
The moniker may have passed into the vernacular because, after agreeing that it was pretty accurate and even changing his Twitter handle to Mr. Tweet, Musk found himself stuck with it — on Twitter.
"Changed my name to Mr. Tweet, now Twitter won't let me change it back 🤣" Musk announced on the social media platform he bought late last year.
While Twitter has been having trouble correcting account problems since Musk abruptly fired half the staff, that claim may be his sense of humor — after all, the "Mr Tweet" gaff came in a civil trial in which Tesla investors are demanding billions of dollars in damages from the fallout over his infamous 2018 tweet announcing that he was taking Tesla private at the suspiciously marijuana-themed price of $420, and had secured funding to do so.
Which he hadn't.
While that was his first truly major Twitter disaster — it came with a $40 million fine from the Securities and Exchange Commission and mandate that the company vet his future Tesla-related tweets — it wasn't his last.
Freedom from Free Speech
Having called himself a "free speech absolutist" in the run-up to his purchase of the social media giant, Musk soon discovered that advertisers were decidedly not.
He has, however, been trying to convince the advertisers to return after they abandoned — or at least called a time out — on the platform over concerns that his free speech stance and reversal of account bans would attract extremists.
That's something else he did on Jan. 25.
Having lost half of his top 100 advertisers within a month, Musk had promised that Twitter would not become a "free-for-all-hellscape" despite having disbanded the independent Trust and Safety Council advisory group.
On Wednesday, Twitter Head of Brand Safety A.J. Brown announced a pair of partnerships with brand safety measurement solutions DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (IAS) in the U.S. He said:
"Twitter is committed to promoting a safe advertising experience for people and brands, and this commitment has never been stronger."
A Massive Effort
Citing a "massive effort," Brown added that "initial testing showed that more than 99% of measured impressions appeared adjacent to content that was deemed safe" by the World Federation of Advertisers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) Brand Safety Floor.
DoubleVerify allows advertisers "to objectively verify and analyze the quality of their U.S. based advertising campaigns... [and] to analyze the suitability of content adjacent to all types of ads, including Promoted Tweets," said Mark Zagorski, CEO of DoubleVerify, in a statement." He added:
"Greater brand and content alignment support campaign performance and ultimately, deliver superior outcomes."
