There was a time several years ago when I actually had a bit of respect for Elon Musk. But any respect I once had is quite simply gone. The man is a bizarre combination of megalomaniac, conspiracy theorist, and troll merged with obscenely rich techbro. He just keeps rolling out insanity after insanity.
Now he is suing advertisers for not buying ads on Twitter / X. I just can’t make this stuff up and it makes me angry, particularly given what Twitter once was.
X is for free speech: free as in crazy…
Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion dollars and took it private i.e.: no share holders to report to. This was a foolish purchase, but it is his money and he is free to waste it. Except it really isn’t his money: he immediately burdened the company after buying it with a huge debt to pay back a big chunk of the purchase price. But I guess that’s business these days, sleazy as it may be.
Musk’s objective, or so he said, was to make Twitter into a bastion for free speech. By his definition that freedom apparently means the speech of racists, sexists, conspiracy theorists, and actual Nazis. I assume this because he re-instated pretty much all of the banned accounts for people of this type and removed most of the content moderation that prevented the worst of their excesses. Musk then set about promoting and highlighting such accounts in his personal Tweets….Xes… whatever. But he owns Twitter so, within the boundaries of the law, whatever speech he wants to permit on the platform is up to him.
Advertisers don’t want their brand next to crazy
Unsurprisingly, many advertisers don’t want their brands to be associated with QAnon or Nazis. So several corporations and advertising industry associations began to halt their advertising buys on the Twitter platform. In particular, the Global Association for Responsible Media (GARM) recommended that its members stop advertising on TwittX.
Removing advertising from Twit… er, ‘X’ seems like a perfectly rational thing for corporations to do. Why would any company want their brand associated with content on the unmoderated shit show X has now become? Any industry association that was intended to help protect brands from social media related damage would be guilty of malfeasance for recommending anything other than staying far, far away from such a platform.
I have no idea how Elon Musk rationalizes his ridiculous court case other than “I’m rich, therefore I am right.” But freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence. Advertisers have a clear right to not risk their brand image by associating it with a toxic stew of hate and bigotry like what X has become. I cannot imagine how a court could possibly find otherwise.
Good God I am glad I left that place!
Goodness, Emily- I’m glad you got out of Twitter before Musk destroyed it.
I was never a super-fan of Twitter, but I appreciated it as a vehicle for the silenced to have their say. The APIs made it possible for trends to be parsed out of the data stream, and for innovators to create new kinds of service. It must have been a huge battle to moderate and keep even slightly rational/positive. I applauded when Trump’s lies resulted in his banning.
Then Musk came back and undid everything good. The APIs became impossible to use due to extreme monetization. The bullies, racists, and bigots were magnified instead of tamped down. The blue checkmarks became purchasable without any practical attempt at validation.
How sad to see something that was at least trying to be a net good turn into such a cesspit. I can’t imagine how that must have hurt for the dedicated people inside the company. Mind you, Musk fired 80% of the staff in the first few weeks so most of the good people were long gone before things really turned south.
I left for good not long after his takeover. Not the first time I left. Now I use Mastodon.
Yeah, Elon. I knew some people who worked at PayPal back in the day that said he was a lot of hot air, so I have always been a bit skeptical of him and of Tesla, which has a market cap greater than that of Toyota despite the latter selling more than 10x… sometimes 20x… cars every year. But I get tech hype and Elon was always promising things to soothe the VC crowd. We also get some local news about him being a twit over there in Fremont, yelling at interns, sexual harassment, and generally doing things that would get you fired most places if you didn’t own the company.
But buying Twitter turned out to be the thing that exposed the real Elon. Now it isn’t so much Musk is a spoiled rich brat, it is who is going along with this charade. His alleged CEO, Linda Yaccarino has really sold her soul, becoming his leading apologist and going along with this asinine criminal conspiracy theory about companies not wanting to tarnish their reputation by advertising on that platform.
I hadn’t really thought about Twitter as being the unravelling of Musk’s facade before: that’s an interesting point.
The two things that complicate my feelings about Musk:
(1) he can arguably be credited with creating the modern electric car market
(2) SpaceX has revolutionized humanity’s access to space.
Both of those things are near and dear to my heart, and Elon created conditions to make both of them happen. It is hard for me to square that with him being such a horrible, horrible troll of an excuse for a human being.
I’m glad that he can’t help but show to the world what a dork and pos he is. The guy is an expert at failing upwards