Posted on 05/17/2022 11:15:43 PM PDT by McGruff
No. It makes no sense to investigate Trump for supposedly inflating his property value because his assessment of his value is irrelevant. The bank uses it’s own valuation agents in determining the value for loan if the buildings are collateral.
On the other hand a business misrepresenting a crucial detail about # of true users is fraud and likely criminal since the number of users is a key datum used by investors & advertisers to determine the stock/advertising value based only on the company’s representation.
The SEC recognizes that the market would fall apart if companies were not policed re honest reporting on their companies financials & relevant data. That is why SEC fines and cites companies for inaccurate info. Purposely misrepresenting for gain is fraud and leaves Twitter open to suit & perhaps criminal proceedings.
I also have a private collection of Utility Masks. You almost have to at times.
I’ve never had a Twitter account, but do follow some users with the Brave web browser(ad blocking). Doing some snooping around, the world wide average estimate of people using ad blockers is around 43%. That is a lot of missing eyeballs for advertisers.
> The entire stock market is a racket, designed to make those politically connected extremely wealthy at our expense. It exists only in peoples’ minds and as ones and zeros on computers. The only people that should own a business are its founders, partners, heirs, or whoever buys it or is willed to after the previous owner’s death.
> The stock market should not exist.
I suppose that at least to some degree I feel your pain, perhaps in the sense that cryptocurrency and stocks seem to be converging on each other in some ways.
Still, stocks form the bedrock of 401Ks and pension funds (do they not?). So, an indictment of the stock market is an indictment of many if not most of us, at least in the aggregate. Corporations have been around in the USA for at least 150 years. If corporations did not exist, something else similar would need to be invented with a different name to take their place in the open market.
so who is Twitter’s CPA???
> I used to buy quite a bit of television advertising. I would be provided with, IIRC, Neilson ratings breaking down the number of viewers at any given time. It was an invaluable service allowing me to get more bang for the buck.
Aren’t Neilson ratings compiled independently, coming with some assurances that they are not tampered with by the TV stations, directly or indirectly? At least, this is my very hazy impression. I recall being asked once if I wanted to participate in TV ratings. They proposed to sign me up and hook up a monitoring box to my TV sets. For some reason that I no longer recall, I got nervous and declined (maybe even at that early time, I did not think that I was watching enough TV to be a valid data point for them).
Yes I believe they are. Now that you mention it, I believe I signed up with them many, many years ago. They monitored what our family watched for a month or so.
Adblockers are essential.
People watch TV by recording and zapping commercials, or go and get a snack. Who would willingly submit themselves to a barrage of hard sells.
Even instacart started shoving commercials in my face such that I had to scroll to shop. I updated my adblock plus & also blocked the specific ad elements.
Advertisers are selling their services to companies but in many cases the effect is not what the companies expect. Advertising drives away the targeted populations to a greater extent the more aggressively it is used. There is a real sense that these ad companies think they have a mindless captive audience and a license to take over our lives. The pushback is real.
Here is the latest twitter quarterly report.
I am skimming but so far I have not seen the auditing accountant firm mentioned anywhere in any twitter filings. I must be missing it. Perhaps someone with more skill and/or patience can find it.
twitter’s auditing company appears to be pricewaterhousecoopers LLP (since 2009).
source:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809121000031/twtr-20201231.ht
(so, is pricewaterhousecoopers in any trouble?)
The stock market is in its essence a bet on productivity and growth in the economy.
Like any other human activity it can be gamed by people willing to manipulate and take advantage of others. That doesn’t make the stock market bad. It does mean that investors need to be careful, not look for a killing, realize that despite the rules there are players with inside knowledge and the muscle to move the market so they can make money on the spread. The defense is not to invest money you must have available in the next year or two and not to sell on the downward trend unless the company has developed company specific or sector issues. If so exit promptly.
The market has ups & downs but in the long term is an invaluable instrument for growth & inflation hedge for those who buy & hold.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3968292/posts
PwC announces a $12 billion plan to recruit 100,000 people and train 25,000 Black and Latinx students over 5 years
Business Insider ^ | 06/16/2021 | Kate Duffy
In other words, he was blowing smoke when he said it was less than 5%.
Now he's being called out on it. Good!
The revenue stream is almost certainly based in large part on the number of real users.
I’ve been using an ad blocker for quite some time for internet browsing. I don’t remember the last time I saw an ad unless it was directly embedded by the website techs. Evidently ad blockers work. My Illinois mailbox has been full of political advertisements in recent days....
You have to think that Facebook is taking a close look at their fake accounts.
Are Tweedledee and Tweedledum members of Twitter?
I think the real issue is, was Twitter taken away from Jack Dorsey by USG agencies? When you read the list of “board members”, each with little or no equity and many with foreign names, you have to wonder, who is really in charge?
Maybe the “private companies” doing all the censorship and narrative creation aren’t so private after all.
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