Elon Musk appears to be freaking out about the exodus of Twitter advertisers since he took control, after he publicly threatened them Friday night.
It all began Friday morning with a Trump-like tweet in which he complained that advertisers were fleeing due to his whining. “activist groups,”He said that it was. “Extremely messed up!”A second attempt “to destroy free speech in America.”He insisted as well “nothing has changed”Since he took control.
Federalist Society colleague Mike Davis was among the many responses to this tweet. Davis is perhaps best-known for his involvement in the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Davis offered some rather dubious legal advice to Musk:
“Name and shame the advertisers who are succumbing to the advertiser boycotts. So we can counter-boycott them. And get your $8 monthly subscription going asap. So we can start to makeup for lost revenue now,”He said it in part.
Musk’s reply: “Thank you. A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues.”
Sure. It is because we know that the best way to get advertisers to give you money is to threaten them with a boycott or doxxing.
As is his habit lately, Musk was widely mocked for the platform he runs. We won’t get too bogged down on that, but we would like to share a couple of the more cogent responses:
Advertisers have been concerned about Twitter’s content moderation since Musk took over. Advertisers don’t want their ads appearing next to disinformation or racist/sexist/harassing/etc tweets, something experts have repeatedly tried to explain to Musk — including one Musk blocked who had participated in a phone meeting Musk held with advertisers on the topic the night before.
He has seen a lot of changes since his takeover, despite the hyperbole in his tweet. He had never owned the company before he purchased it. Several timesHe wanted to dramatically reduce the amount of content that is moderated on Twitter. When he finally took control, there was a noticeable spike in hateful and bigoted comments. And of course, Musk ended his first weekend as Twitter’s new owner by sharing a homophobic conspiracy theory about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
He’s also announced a plan to replace the site’s current verification system with a subscription service anyone can pay for — which as experts and users alike have explained, utterly defeats the purpose of verification. And that’s not even getting into sudden mass layoffs that appear to have, among other things, killed the company’s human rights team and This has been drastically reducedThe content moderation team.