Elon Musk has accused activist groups of “trying to destroy free speech in America” by pressuring advertisers to boycott Twitter, saying Twitter has suffered a “massive” drop in advertising revenues following the campaign. The Telegraph has the story.
The billionaire blamed the fall on “activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists”.
He added: “They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”
On Friday, the pressure group Stop Hate for Profit, which led an advertising boycott of Facebook in 2020 that cost the social network tens of millions of dollars, urged companies to stop dealing with Twitter. The group, which is organised by the U.S. Anti-Defamation League, said: “We are calling on advertisers to pause their spend globally.”
It came as Volkswagen told its brands, which include Bentley, Porsche and Lamborghini, to halt marketing on the social media site until further notice.
It is the latest company to sever ties with Twitter following Musk’s tumultuous $44bn (£38bn) takeover.
Audi, one of VW’s brands, had already suspended advertising, while Carlsberg, Cadbury’s owner Mondelez and Pfizer have also distanced themselves.
Jordan Schachtel reports that the campaign is being led by “a network of Left wing dark money activists with ties to prominent Democrat politicians and mega donors”.
An advocacy group formed in 2020 called Accountable Tech is organising the pressure campaign, which has thus far succeeded in having the likes of Pfizer, Audi, General Mills and other corporations pull their advertising expenditures from the platform.
Accountable Tech has taken credit for organising an “open letter” signed by dozens of progressive groups, which demanded that multinational corporations cease advertising with Twitter immediately.
The Far Left activist groups wrote:
We, the undersigned organisations, call on you to notify Musk and publicly commit that you will cease all advertising on Twitter globally if he follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.
So who funds Accountable Tech?
Accountable Tech is financed by The North Fund, a D.C. nonprofit that is controlled by Arabella Advisors. Yes, there are multiple levels of confusion and separation, and this is on purpose. But the relevant outfit here is Arabella Advisors.
“Arabella” is a for-profit “philanthropic consulting company” founded by Clinton confidant Eric Kessler. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jesse Lehrich, another Clinton network operative, is a co-founder of Accountable Tech. The organisation also employs former Clinton campaign operative Zach Praiss as its Digital Director.
Arabella is considered the leading “dark money” political outfit in the United States. Yes, it’s much bigger and much more influential than the highly publicised “Koch Network.”
The Arabella network shields the sources of its funding by funneling its cash and political expenditures through 501c4 non profits. However, its for-profit outfit brought in $1.7 billion in 2020, and spent $1.2 billion on the 2020 election cycle.
Through its subsidiaries, Arabella has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into projects such as fighting the Kavanaugh nomination and impeaching President Donald Trump. It has also financed the “NeverTrump” political advocacy of progressive war activist Bill Kristol.
So who funds Arabella?
Major direct and indirect Arabella donors include globalist billionaire George Soros and progressive eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, according to Politico.
This is reminiscent of the Stop Funding Hate campaign that has resulted in companies starving GB News of advertising revenue.
With such a powerful hegemony of Far Left woke ideas among major companies and institutions, the outlook for free speech is looking dire right now. The West has lost sight of the meaning of tolerance and the importance of respect for the free expression of ideas. Worst of all, with some of the recent prevailing woke notions – lockdowns, Net Zero, transgenderism – so disastrous for individuals and humanity, the relentless efforts of the woke herd to lock in their insane opinions by stamping out all dissent may spell serious consequences, unless enough of them can somehow be jolted into snapping out of it soon. Let’s hope Elon holds the line and prevails.
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“we did everything we could to appease the activists”
That, Mr Musk, was your first and most costly mistake. Never, but never, appease these people, cave in to them or apologise to them. Ever.
I didn’t notice him doing anything, I suspect Musk knows exactly what the game is and who his opposition is.
People have posted differing opinions of Musk here and I don’t know enough about him to say who I think is right. However his purchase of Twitter has flushed out the enemy and will have made a few more people aware of how bad things are. I think that has to be good for us.
I personally have a lot of time for the Common Sense approach to coming to some sort of opinion, when ‘objective’ means are so hard to come by. Past articles published on this very site have occasionally made the for placing more credibility on the valuable commodity, so rare among politicians but in plentiful supply among ‘ordinary’ people, at least of the mask/lockdown-sceptic kind. Watching the recent 2-part documentary about Musk, ‘The Elon Musk Show’ – unusually unbiased for a BBC production, I felt – Musk ‘comes across’ as being a Nice Guy. Slightly autistic seeming, perhaps – unusual, eccentric, possibly – but.. nice. Not phoney. Not creepy. Not faking anything for the cameras. A person I’d happily invite to dinner. Most significantly – no hidden agendas. By contrast, Gates comes across as the opposite of these things and not very bright into the bargain, while Zuckerberg seems not of this earth by any measurement. Perhaps he’s done some shady stuff here and there – who hasn’t; but, as with Trump, he seems, all things considered, a nice bloke. I like Musk.
Sorry for reposting the link but I think it worth posting twice. This really is a good documentary podcast fleshing out the persona.
https://www.corbettreport.com/musk/
I think his personality is not as important as what he does with his vast wealth and power. The fruits of his labours help us understand the man.
Here’s a good perspective on Musk, with source material to draw your own conclusions. https://www.corbettreport.com/musk/
We should try and keep an optimistic even keel for as long as possible, but resign ourselves to the likelihood that someday we will to have to leave the sinking ship.
Surely all it will take is for Apple Store and Google Play store to ban it – like they did with Parler and it’s 40 billion gone phutt!
That Carlsberg, Mondelez (Cadburys) and Pfizer, who profit from the actual and real ‘health crises’ of obesity and alcoholism, act in concert with these guardians of morality, by immorally using their leviathan financial might to immorally coerce and control.
Alanis Morrissette, if you are reading this, this is irony.
America cannot claim to be a democracy with corporatism so deeply entrenched and so proactive.
I hope they are able to keep going for a while. I’m not surprised he fired a load of people. There were more than 7,500 of them- goodness knows what most of them did all day; the software can’t be that complicated.
The Babylon Bee has 27 jobs that have been eradicated, it’s funny….
I love the idea of Volkswagen getting snooty about possible associations with hateful speach, given their origins in pre war Nasty Germany and their patron the Furrier….
(good job we don’t have to censor our words here…)
And VW built in cheat devices to get their cars through emissions tests. No hypocrisy in Wolfsburg I see.
It’s follow the money time – as ever.
Surprised the BMGF aren’t in there somewhere they’ve got their slippery malodorous tentacles in most things.
If Musk is a true believer in freedom of speech then the best thing he could do is shut down Twitter. The only people who would miss it are the twats of politicians, journalists and their camp followers. For the rest of us this draining of the swamp would be a welcome first step in the return of humanity. But I guess that even the world’s richest man would think twice about losing £38bn.
There most certainly is a war on the Western World, from “WITHIN”. We have wokery scanning all works of art now for any link however tenuous that the artist or anyone who came within a hundred yards of him/her had links to slavery, then once they have identified some pseudo link to discrimination in a small corner of the work up pipes the likes of Dianne Abbot to shout “here here” and want to ban it. The same with Orchestras playing the music of dead white men like Beethoven and Mozart who are attacked for not being diverse enough. There is no area of western life that doesn’t get it in the neck for apparently not complying with wokery’s diversity agenda, which ofcourse only means one thing ——Less white people
Free speech may possibly be advanced if Twitter collapses spawning new social media companies which would be more difficult for the deep state and woke corporations to bully and boycott.
The abuse of lax tax regulations around fake charities and supposedly not for profit organizations and other NGOs, is funding and facilitating this destabilization of rich Western countries. Only in the West where countries have become so wealthy can they afford this or even allow it. These are all funded through tax deductible contributions thus, in effect, funded by western countries taxes. Western countries are funding their own destabilization. Until this stops we will continue to see the downfall of our societies.
I’ve temporarily forgotten/mislayed the name of Dan Bonginos organisation but it is a model of how we can address this. What he’s created is a register of companies that do not censor or in any other way seek to control their customers behaviour …. I would certainly appreciate a registry of UK companies that behave this way so I could direct my spending accordingly. At least we would be able to starve these b a s t a r d s of our money if they behave like VW et al.