But there have been calls to violence on Twitter for a long time. Just in Portland, we had 100 days of street violence, a prolonged attempt to burn down a federal courthouse, various attacks on the city mayor, and the attempted murder of a gay immigrant journalist. It wasn’t hard at the time to find Tweets planning and celebrating all of this stuff.
If it’s truly about violence, why are the advertisers just now getting cold feet?
For context, Twitter has never had a particularly compelling ads product. Like it or not, both FB and Google have super compelling products: the best (by far) tracking, targeting, cross-device linking, or intent. eg Facebook could match your user across devices, browsers, and apps; and allowed ecom targeting by phone or address, not just pixels or cookies. Google has a near-monopoly on the highest-intent ads next to their searches. That's why, in 2021, Google earned $209B from ads, FB $115B from ads, and Twitter < $5B from ads.
Add that up with Musk's ... compelling offer to whip his followers into a rage at you if you, say, reduce ad spend allocation to Twitter in your quarterly ad rebalancing, and it's not hard to see how we got where we are.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587899771091566595
I've lived here for 23 years and been an activist intermittently through the years. The activists/antifa here are not the supersoliders the press, the cops and the mayors make them out to be. They're mostly street kids, crust punks, well-meaning college and grad school students, some hippies and autistic communists. Not an invading army ffs. Just folks. Also, Andy Ngo is a fascist bootlicker pissbaby loser and his followers are Nazis, so you can fuck right off with that "attempted murder of a gay immigrant journalist" tripe you're selling.