Elon’s promotion of anti-trans hate video causes another exodus
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$44 billion is a lot to put at stake when you’re interested in promoting your repellent views about trans people rather than running a business:
Over the course of a day, though, the turmoil that has marked Musk’s seven-month ownership of the social media platform came roaring back.
On Thursday, Twitter was roiled by an organized pressure campaign by conservative pundits seeking to promote a 95-minute anti-transgender video called “What Is A Woman?” Musk, who has staked out views hostile to transgender advocates, initially responded in ways that seemed to satisfy no one before he eventually relented and agreed to promote the video himself. The incident resulted in two high-level departures within 24 hours.
The episode was another window into Musk’s improvisational approach to rewriting Twitter’s rules.
The chief of Twitter’s trust and safety division, Ella Irwin, left the company that same day, after a tenure leading its efforts around content moderation. A second executive, A.J. Brown, whose job was to reassure advertisers that Twitter was a safe place for their brands, also decided to quit, The Wall Street Journal reported. A third person, a program manager who worked on brand safety, said on her Twitter profile that she was now “ex-Twitter.”
Musk said in a tweet Friday that the departures were related to his decision to allow the conservative outlet The Daily Wire to post “What Is A Woman?” — a decision that thrust Twitter back into a raging cultural debate.
Well, it’t not like all those brands being alienated are a critical source of revenue or something.
Speaking of Elon, what the hell was this:
DeSantis’s decision to begin his campaign like this is a sign of weakness in three ways. First, there’s his inability to see what is obvious to Musk’s critics, which is that Musk, while perhaps a genius in some areas, is also often an arrogant screw-up whose projects break down in public. (See: the Tesla Cybertruck’s supposedly shatterproof windows or the explosion of the SpaceX Starship.) You have to be fairly deep in the right-wing echo chamber to believe Musk’s self-presentation as a swaggering Tony Stark figure who can be counted on to deliver.
Second, DeSantis’s decision to make his tacit alliance with Musk such an integral part of his campaign identity suggests a submissive and receding quality. He ran for governor in 2018 by emphasizing his worshipful fealty to Donald Trump, cutting an embarrassing commercial in which he lovingly instructed his children in the MAGA gospel. Now, coming out of Trump’s shadow, he’s opted to attach himself to another big, strong friend rather than stand on his own. Last night, after the announcement, his campaign tweeted a bizarre, music-less video that features DeSantis speaking about immigration over a montage of images of him and of Musk, as if they were running for president as a team.
I genuinely don’t understand why DeSantis’s campaign video had more footage of Musk than himself in it. Maybe the idea was to make him look good by highlighting one of the few people who is even less funny and charismatic?