Twitter (sorry, X) just made a big advertising blunder
This is the opposite of retweeting praise.
We all follow somebody who loves to retweet their own praise. Sharing one's own compliments is a very 21st Century faux pas (or is it actually perfectly fine?), but you don't see many retweeting their own insults – except, that is, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino.
The company made a pretty hilarious advertising blunder this week, with Yaccarino posting a new video ad for the platform featuring some fast-scrolling down a Twitter (nope, not calling it X) feed. But eagle-eyed viewers were quick to spot that the clip, if paused at the right moments, featured some pretty damning Tweets about Elon Musk and the direction Twitter is heading in.
twitter deleted their new ad dunking on twitter pic.twitter.com/MavO1cfTKeSeptember 21, 2023
"The timeline algo is dying fr it’s becoming mediocre engagement maxxed [sic] on low effort report accounts and dating discourse," one tweet reads (in some admittedly hard-to-decipher Twitter speak), while another references Twitter's apparent platforming of anti-Semitic accounts, claiming "Twitter’s value has fallen by at least 50%, and Elon is blaming it all on the Jews. Masterful gambit sir.”
Hilariously, when Yaccarino inevitably deleted and re-upped the video (below), she claimed it was in order to share it "in higher res" – but of course, in the updated version, the offending Tweets were gone (although some still slipped through the net).
a hint of what's to come... (in higher res) pic.twitter.com/bMeKX1bgb7September 21, 2023
And yet, in what has been, to put it mildly, a tumultuous year for Twitter, this hardly even stands out. From a botched UI to the most chaotic rebrand of all time, we've seen some clangers from the company in 2023.
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Daniel John is Design Editor at Creative Bloq. He reports on the worlds of design, branding and lifestyle tech, and has covered several industry events including Milan Design Week, OFFF Barcelona and Adobe Max in Los Angeles.