Tech billionaire Elon Musk has threatened to publicly slam advertisers who stop showing ads on Twitter. With his tweet last night, the new Twitter owner responded to a right-wing lobbyist’s suggestion that he should name the advertisers “so that we can subject them to a counter-boycott”. Musk wrote in his reply, “Thank you. A thermonuclear naming and shaming is exactly what will happen if this doesn’t stop.”
In the past few days, the Volkswagen Group, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the food giant Mondelez, among others, had announced that they wanted to suspend advertising on Twitter. Companies worrying about their ads appearing alongside negative content isn’t a new phenomenon. Google’s video subsidiary YouTube has also struggled with this.
Controversy over (the limits of) freedom of speech
Musk had raised such concerns himself with frequent criticism that Twitter had restricted freedom of speech too much. Last week he then tried to reassure advertisers with an open letter: Twitter will not be a place where you can do anything without consequences. Even now he emphasizes that nothing has changed in the content rules of the platform. Nevertheless, some advertisers are holding back.
Musk complained on Friday about a “massive drop in sales” and blamed it on “activist groups” who put pressure on companies. These unspecified activists sought to “destroy free speech in America.” The right-wing Internet lobbyist Mike Davis then proposed on Twitter a counter-boycott of advertisers who bowed to such pressure. Davis railed against the “cancel culture” in several organizations, among other things, and wants to hold internet companies responsible for the alleged suppression of conservative views.
Musk completed the purchase of Twitter for around $44 billion last week and, among other things, took on debt that has to be serviced. Ad revenue accounts for nearly all of Twitter’s revenue, making its decline particularly painful.
