Toxic Twitter: bringing back banned accounts generates ad revenue

This Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) report examines accounts previously banned from Twitter for policy violations and reinstated after Elon Musk's takeover, tracking their tweet-impression data from mid-December 2022 onward. Researchers sampled 1,039 tweets to establish an average ad-appearance frequency, then combined that with industry cost-per-impression estimates to project annual ad revenue.

Across ten reinstated accounts, the analysis found roughly 2.5 billion accumulated tweet impressions and about 54 million combined daily impressions, projecting to around 20 billion impressions annually. Based on these figures, the report estimates Twitter could generate up to $19 million a year in ad revenue from just these ten accounts, with Andrew Tate's account alone estimated at $12.3 million annually.

The report concludes that reinstating previously banned users, some of whom had been removed for hate speech or misinformation, appears to generate meaningful advertising revenue for the platform, and that major brands risk having their ads placed alongside this content as a result of these reinstatements.