A lawyer from X/Twitter has issued an ultimatum to advertisers who pulled their advertising: return or else.
When wealthy idiot, Elon Musk, bought Twitter for $44 billion, work began immediately to burn the whole platform to the ground. Whether that was censoring speech, banning people who would dare hurt his feelings, reinstating the accounts for fascists and right wing terrorists, neutering moderation, having users content train its AI, and letting scams and bots run rampant across the platform, Musk did a lot to drive away as many users from the platform as possible.
Unsurprisingly, those actions ended up having consequence. Advertisers grew increasingly agitated that their advertisements were sponsoring hate speech and extremism. Despite assurances from the Musk team, advertising continued to appear next to hate and scams. Finally, advertisers had enough of sponsoring hate and began pulling advertising from the platform. In response, moron Musk told advertisers in response that they can fuck off. So, fuck off they did and they dropped their advertising dollars.
It wasn’t until a considerable amount of time that this financial hit finally registered to dumbass Musk. When he no doubt saw that X/Twitter was taking a financial hit from his really stupid decisions, Musk responded by suing the advertisers for the crime of failing to advertise on his platform. For many observers, the lawsuit represented the dumbest legal action Musk has taken yet because there simply isn’t a case to be had.
While a few advertisers eventually caved and came back small amounts, including the Toronto Star, the dollars were nowhere near the levels they once were.
Of course, things have changed since then. Trump, unfortunately, won the federal election and Musk has now become America’s shadow president where he is running the government into the ground in the same way that he ran X/Twitter into the ground. With this newfound power, Musk is exerting that power to coerce businesses to bend at the knee and kiss the Trump ring.
One of the ways he is doing that, apparently, is using threats to order advertisers to spend money on his platform. Reports are surfacing that advertisers are fielding phone calls from the X/Twitter legal teams with ultimatums that they must return to spending huge sums of advertising dollars on Twitter “or else”. From Gizmodo:
Musk’s nearly $300 million gamble on the re-election of President Trump continues to show dividends. A new report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that advertisers are returning to X in order to avoid being added to an ongoing lawsuit by the company or see their own business dealings targeted by the Trump administration.
The report starts by noting that a major advertising agency called Interpublic is currently seeking to merge with rival Omnicom for $13 billion. While that might have stoked normal anti-trust concerns under the Biden administration, as a consolidated marketer would have more leverage to seek favorable ad prices, it appears that X sees it as an enviable opportunity to strike a quid pro quo deal:
A lawyer at advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group fielded a phone call in December from a lawyer at X. The message was clear, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation: Get your clients to spend more on Elon Musk’s social-media platform, or else.
Indeed, as the report suggests, X/Twitter is a terrible place to advertise. Of course, with Musk using the power of the federal government to intimidate businesses, what these businesses feel is the right decision for themselves doesn’t really matter any more. The question is whether or not the businesses in question can withstand retribution from the Trump/Musk presidency for failing to make the political tithe.
This is a debate that has divided businesses in the country with some, like the Washington Post and the LA Times, choosing to kiss the ring and appease the fascist dictator. Some likely were hoping to keep on the down low and remain quiet with the hopes of not having to arrive to any conclusion. Now that the threats to businesses are going out, it looks like those businesses who were hoping to silently sit on the fence will likely be forced into a decision anyway – especially if they had prior advertising relationships with Twitter.
The question at this point is how far the coercion, threats, and intimidation will ultimately end up going. There is a good possibility that things will only escalate from here. Either way, if advertising does return to X/Twitter, well, we’ll know why.
