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Musk's X sues advertisers over alleged 'massive advertiser boycott'.
(www.voanews.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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You can sue your... customers, basically for choosing not to do business with you!?
Even if he wins a one-time payment (no way), how could this do anything but make everyone not want to advertise on Twitter??
I can't wrap my head around the ridiculousness of it. Or grasp why some US political figures are lapping it up.
Imagine McDonald's suing you because you didn't buy enough big macs this quarter. It's crazy. You're not automatically entitled to having customers.
Please drink verification can
Pure speculation on the only real way it could have merit:
Sometimes there actually are contracts for minimum spending. This happens with actual physical products in exchange for a better bulk price, and would usually take extraordinary events to breach the contract on the manufacturer's side to break as the purchaser, because it may involve stuff like building up manufacturing capacity. In that context, it's a perfectly legitimate business practice.
The economics of websites are different, but (without direct knowledge of anyone's practices) it's within the realm of plausibility that similar contracts exist on big advertising platforms. It's valuable for larger advertisers to keep price down, and it's valuable for the platforms to have a steady base level of advertising.
If those contracts do exist, then the case might have the potential to be interesting. How badly does a platform have to materially degrade the value of their advertising before advertisers are able to back out of pre-existing deals? (The other option is collusion, but good luck showing cause for that.)
You don't understand. Bad publicity is good publicity.
Or maybe, in this particular case... No publicity.
No publicity is good bad publicity like... Well yeah you might have a point there
Elon is the dumbest genius 🤦♂️
To quote Legal Eagle on Nebula: it depends. Suppose that the customers had a deal with Twitter granting them special pricing, but on the condition that they spend a certain amount during a given period. Then the customers could be breaching the terms of the contract by dropping out halfway through. I'm not saying that's what's happening here, and IANAL of course, but it seems plausible to me.
So what you are thinking is all the media outlets are so shit they didn't read the case and none of them found it saying, breach of contract. Could be true with how a lot of reporting goes these days, but why would the lawyers for X have not just said, this suit is about breach of contract, not conspiracy to boycott a poor billionaire's company he is embezzling money to through Tesla?
I haven't read the case either. But what I do know is the news media isn't always as nuanced in their reporting of court cases, as the cases warrants.
If that is the case here I don't know. Musk is a POS, so everything is definitely possible. All I'm saying is that if it actually is a breach of contract, then Musk could have a case.
But imagine signing a contract, where you have to buy a set amount of advertising, with no clause about the site's conduct and reputation.
You can in case of protected group discrimination sue the business, but suing customers is something new.