Advertisers Flee X as Outcry Grows Over Musk’s Endorsement of Antisemitic Post
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
musk explained his comment below in that thread and i thought it was done acceptably, he wasn't antisemitic, he just continued a conversation that implied [correctly] that throughout the last ~10 years there has been a tail-wagging-the-dog relationship between what is currently the demographic with a large outcry of support for israel and the demographic with a large outcry of support for hamas. that the demographic in support of israel is usually the manipulator in this situation, and that this has usually been used against a lot of the people who actually are in support of israel in the current day.
he's not wrong, its not antisemitic, and taking this stance doesn't imply you're a nazi, and certainly doesn't imply who or what kind of solution you might suppport.
yet complexity is not allowed.
but what's interesting here is X's apparent rise in the status of its advertisement real estate[0]. I think this will turn out positive for twitter and elon no matter what, people seem to like twitter and want it to keep being what it is. I for one look forward to the day when we can have simple conversations in public without other people panicking in response.
X's apparent rise in the status of its advertisement real estate
that's an interesting way to describe running more and cheaper ads to make up for the loss of revenue.
> anti-semitic white nationalist conspiracy theory
and this, is somehow an attempt to skirt around what i'd already written. its not a conspiracy theory, its not white nationalist, its not antisemitic, its just an observation of dynamics between demographics over the latest in modern history.
however, there is in fact a mainstream narrative that scares people with stories of nutjob right-wing conspiracy theories. and sure they exist, in extremely small numbers. the problem is that the people who push this narrative also ignore plenty of racism and spew plenty of conspiracy theories while ignoring extremism on their own side. and anything you say that can possibly look like you're within the bottom 1% of IQ on the right-wing extreme will be used against you through the power of misrepresentation, despite not having any relation nor any appreciation of it.
there's nothing within the substance of the criticism that isn't used hypocritically against who its aimed at.
all i want is to be casual again. over-analyzing simple remarks to attack an individual is a sign of genuine malice, there's more written between the lines of the actions taken against him than whatever meta-conversation someone might imply exists in the background of a single tweet.
all i want is to be casual again. over-analyzing simple remarks to attack an individual is a sign of genuine malice
GMAFB. If Musk wants to be casual he can just have an anonymous shitposting account, and perhaps he does. You're asking that we just ignore his extremely vocal aspirations on free speech, on transforming Twitter into an 'everything app', on the commercial realities of social media data mining with all the implications for privacy, surveillance and so on, and on the fact that we're on a news website for hackers where we take pride in finding clever ways to store, sift, and exploit huge fields of data. It's asinine to expect that the guy with the not-inconsiderable personality cult also be treated as a regular goof with a bunch of low-IQ takes and immunized from criticism on that basis.
Being casual is what anonymous posting is for. You can go to 4chan or wherever, shitpost, get things wrong, make an ass of yourself sometimes, and have conversations of no great consequence. I have done so for many years, and still do. Anonymous fora work because good or bad, popular or unpopular, your comments aren't tied to an identity and it frees you from a lot of ego traps as well as social restraints.
Musk on the other hand is vocally against anonymity, often citing the need to fight spam (although I don't think he's sincere about this, given the way Twitter/X actually operates and the specific changes he's made around API access and how reports are handled). If he doesn't believe in anonymous shitposting, and thinks people on social media should own their posts, then it's not unreasonable for others (eg advertisers) to take teh same attitude toward him.
I wish CEOs and owners were more vocal about their beliefs. It would help weeding the garbage out.
All these threads talking about the same reports/same mix of companies
Consolidate or something
I’d imagine that even when IBM and Apple were still advertising, it was much less than before.
They’re not even running low-end ads at this point. They’re running generated clickbait.
Oh and absolute blatant trademark violations. An ad with Elon’s face and the X logo for “X Coin official ICO”
How can they possibly pivot to money handling services if they have no choice but to let their brand be completely eroded like that?
It's really been a race to the bottom.
Let's *never forget* that the Holocaust wouldn't have been as effective if it weren't for *International Business Machines* punch cards and its ties to the Nazi party.[^1] I'm not surprised they split.
Remember kids: a crypto-fascist is still a fascist.
As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.
Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.
'Decolonization' has been in the air a lot recently due to the ongoing war in Gaza but is mainly used to describe the gradual unwinding of European colonialism/imperialism; Wikipedia's article provides a good overview. The term is often associated with Frantz Fanon, who opposed the French colonialization of Algeria, and wrote several influential books on the subject, the most famous being The Wretched of the Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization
For Musk to engage in such an abrupt reversal of his stated free speech ideals (and barely-qualified endorsement of white nationalist conspiracy theories yesterday), Twitter's financials must be undergoing a severe erosion.
Invariably, "decolonizing" a subject means systematically booting white authors out, or pivoting from teaching the subject matter plain and simple to teaching ideology and relativizing everything because Heaven forbid a minority kid would feel bad (which itself is mostly just an excuse)
That doesn't mean that he himself is one, only that his grift currently lies with some of those people.
“Christian eschatologists” could apply to about 100 different touted beliefs with a 1000 nuance flavors of each. Let’s not paint all those folks with a pro-Israel yet anti-Semitic brush. There may be some of that, but it’s certainly not all and not even enough to consider it a defining characteristic of most.
There is also a distinction that should be made between political Zionism and religious Zionism. I am a Christian, I hold a preterist eschatological viewpoint and don’t belong to an “evangelical” church. As such the restoration of Israel in 1948 has ZERO theological meaning to me. However, can I accept the creation of Israel in 1948 a politically valid political event? Sure, the established world authority of the time made it happen and did it for a reason. To me the current conflict is just like many—-over land, money, and power. So I believe that Israel has a right to exist because the world authority gave it that right in 1948. In that sense I am a political Zionist.
That makes me definitely not the same as a Christian who believes the restoration of Israel in 1948 is a sign post pointing to a ton of biblical prophecy culminating in an apocalypse with the current conflict having a supernatural meaning with a theological side that must be taken to scare people into a belief system. Those are religious zionists with a futurism eschatology. We may both believe that Israel should exist, but we don’t believe in the same “why”.
It’s entirely possible for you to be the kind of non-evangelical, Christian “political” Zionist that this doesn’t apply to. But that doesn’t change the statistic, and it doesn’t change Musk’s audience.
Either way I wanted to provide context against the generalization/stereotype your post created.