I had hoped that Musk had a plan for Twitter, besides just using it as a platform for him to express his white angst and daddy issues. Unfortunately for us, it’s much worse, and Musk has shown a dedication to using twitter just to spew nonsense and seemingly to attack advertisers.
Before even this morning, people were wondering how far Musk would go. In fact, he said that he was already considering virtually blackmailing advertisers, and then exposing them to the public if they didn’t buy ads
“You have nearly 114,000,000 Twitter followers. Name and shame the advertisers who are succumbing to the advertiser boycotts,” random Twitterer Mike Davis suggested to him. So we can counter-boycott them. And get your $8 monthly subscription going asap. So we can start to makeup for lost revenue now.”
Musk jumped on this suggestion.
“Thank you,: the billionaire responded. “A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues.”
He did not say when he would carry out this threat. It is also unclear whether this threat will deter advertisers who do not want to see their products and services associated with hate speech or perceived as in support of it.
Then this morning, it got worse. Musk suggested in a tweet that he might have legal damages against activists for getting advertisers to pull advertising. In a response to right-wing activist Tom Fitton, one of the January 6th attorneys, he said “we do,” when asked if they have possible legal claims.
We didn’t really believe that he cared about brand safety, as he claimed just a week ago. After all, if he did, he wouldn’t have let key leaders on Twitter’s advertising team go, including chief customer officer Sarah Personette and chief marketing officer Leslie Berland. And he wouldn’t have fired all of Twitter’s content moderation staff Friday.
Also, instead of actually trying to work with advertisers, it seems Musk is working harder on making himself seem to be a victim of the “big bad liberal media.”
Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America,” Musk tweeted.
He’s also shown that he plans to use Twitter as a way to punish his detractors and those he just doesn’t like. Comedian Kathy Griffin was suspended from Twitter on Nov. 6, the same day she altered her account to joke that she was Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of the social media company. It was unclear if Griffin’s suspension was temporary or permanent. Twitter also did not say if her account’s suspension was directly related to her impersonating Musk.
Let’s make this clear, he really doesn’t care about “free speech.” Twitter already allowed diverse opinions, and frankly, everyone knows what he meant: he wants extremists to be allowed back on twitter, regardless of what they say and do. This is nothing but gaslighting done by a billionaire who thinks he’s the of speech. These lies are part of the “big lie,” that we don’t have real democracy in this Country, and that “evil corporations” are taking away our free speech.
If you think it couldn’t get any worse, you’re wrong. According to multiple reports, Musk has started to ask as much as 500 people he had just fired to return to work, because he realizes that the company couldn’t run without them. One employee who didn’t want to be named, fearing retaliation from Musk, said that his job was to run Twitter’s internal advertising and RFP system — and that it seems that Musk had no one to explain to anyone how to use it.
In the run up to Friday’s purge, Musk’s new leadership had given employees “zero communication” about whose jobs would be at risk – and many of those employees said they would not be returning to work for Musk, only to be fired a week later after being “used.”
Elon Musk “doesn’t know what he’s doing” with Twitter and is “making everyone alarmed”, said Bruce Daisley, Twitter’s former Vice President for Europe and Africa. “I think Elon thought he was going to come in and solve everything and very quickly he’s going to work out that it’s far more complicated. It’s pretty evident from every public action that he’s taken with this whole acquisition: he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
So what are the implications of his “free speech?” The only people who were “restricted” on Twitter were often the hard-core racists and trolls — those that would create accounts for the single purpose of harassing and threatening people. These people already have a place: the 4chans of the world, where advertisers use their “free speech,” to not advertise there.
Of course, this is what this is really all about: Musk wants to force advertisers to stay on Twitter, even if he continues to promote it as a cesspool of white supremacist trolls.
I think that’s actually an overly optimistic way of looking at this— no really. It’s very possible Musk has no idea what he is doing, but maybe he is just having a breakdown in real-time on Twitter, the platform he just wasted billions and billions on. I can’t imagine any other reason he would think it would be a smart idea to threaten, blackmail and then insult advertisers.
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