After years of Meta insisting its content moderation was essential for platform health, Zuckerberg’s sudden embrace of fake “free speech” is having exactly the consequences anyone paying attention would expect. Just as advertisers fled ExTwitter when Musk decided “brand safety” was for wimps, Meta’s advertisers are getting nervous about their own brands being associated with whatever bigoted “edgy” content Zuck now thinks deserves his personal protection. For all the ideological posturing about “free speech,” it turns out advertisers have a simple calculus: they’d rather not pay to have their ads appear next to hate speech.
The ExTwitter saga offers a preview of what happens when platforms prioritize provocative content over brand safety. Elon had driven away nearly half of Twitter’s advertisers within the first few months and then continued to drive them away in droves ever since. It probably didn’t help that Elon told advertisers to go fuck themselves and then sued some other advertisers as well.
While Musk’s spectacular alienation of advertisers might seem like a unique case, Meta is now facing similar scrutiny after Zuckerberg caved to Trump’s demands on moderation. The question now is whether Meta will face a similar advertising exodus.
Admittedly, Meta’s calculation reflects more finesse than Musk’s scorched-earth approach. With Facebook and Instagram’s unmatched reach and proven ROI, Zuckerberg seems to be betting that his platforms are simply too valuable for advertisers to abandon—a high-stakes gamble that assumes brand safety concerns won’t outweigh market reach. And even as he’s trying to cosplay as the cool meme kid on podcasts, he doesn’t quite have that true “go fuck yourself” spirit that Elon gives off.
However, as the WSJ recently detailed, advertisers are rethinking their Meta ad spend. Again, it’s not because of ideological disagreements. It’s that they know that advertising in the proverbial Nazi bar isn’t exactly good for the brand. Just as a bar that tolerates Nazis soon becomes a Nazi bar, a platform that embraces “controversial” content risks becoming defined by its most extreme voices.
Advertisers have expressed concerns over the past few weeks—in meetings with Meta as well as with their own agency partners—that Meta’s tools might not be enough to stop ads from showing up near offensive content as the new content-moderation approach comes into effect, and that user feeds could become inundated with misinformation.
On the recent call, Meta’s vice president of content policy, Monika Bickert, said Meta wants to remove content that contributes to increased safety risks, but “allow people to talk about the news and the world around them and not be overly restrictive.” One significant change: “Hate speech,” a term that she said “has different meanings to different people,” is being replaced by “hateful conduct.”
And, look, for years Techdirt has pointed out the challenges of defining “hate speech” in a manner that isn’t abused to suppress certain kinds of important speech (often speaking out against those in power). But, advertisers aren’t that concerned with that level of nuance. They’re not advertising to support a debate over racism. They just don’t want to have their brand look terrible.
Brand safety “has become politicized and it was never motivated by politics,” said Brad Jakeman, a former marketer at PepsiCo. The movement around brand safety happened because “we heard from our consumers that they felt uncomfortable with our brands being connected to content that they found offensive,” he said.
Of course, the article also points out that a lot of companies are being much quieter about their plans this time around. They’ve already seen how the likes of Jim Jordan will weaponize the government against any attempt to not advertise on his favored websites—a particularly rich irony coming from a politician who regularly rails against “the weaponization of the government” to suppress speech.
Ad executives say they are wary of putting a target on their backs by speaking up about brand safety, and some agencies are now reluctant to send clients “point-of-view” memos on the topic when online controversies arise.
“Brand safety is under attack at a time when it’s needed more than ever before,” given the huge audiences for platforms like Instagram and X and their more hands-off approach to monitoring posts, said Doug Rozen, former CEO of ad giant Dentsu’s media-buying unit in the U.S.
The message between the lines is clear: advertisers may be quieter about their exodus this time, but that doesn’t make it any less real. They’re simply choosing to vote with their dollars rather than their voices.
Even if their ads don’t run directly alongside objectionable content, some advertisers are concerned that the changes could lead to an explosion of toxic or misleading posts on Meta’s platforms, making the general environment less suitable for ads. In addition to paid ads, many advertisers publish organic posts on Meta platforms. Some are asking Meta to provide tools so those posts can also avoid controversial content.
The reality is that content moderation was never just about political correctness or censorship—it was about creating sustainable platforms where both users and advertisers felt comfortable participating. Meta may be about to learn this lesson the hard way.
The 53-page report, titled “Delusion of Collusion: How the House Republican Majority Abused Oversight Powers to Protect Elon Musk and Silence His Critics,” exhaustively documents how Jordan launched a sham investigation in what appears to be a clear attempt to intimidate advertisers and bully them into subsidizing Musk’s ExTwitter, while falsely claiming it was about fighting “collusion.”
Because the Democrats tend to be inept and incompetent in explaining reality to people, Rep. Jerry Nadler released the report on New Year’s Eve where it basically got zero attention. As far as I can tell, the only news report to cover it was a small legal antitrust trade publication. By the time the ball dropped in Times Square hours after the report had been released, it had effectively disappeared.
However, it deserves way more attention for all of the nonsense it puts into the public record, specifically focusing on Jordan and Musk’s effort to attack GARM, a small non-profit that just worked with advertisers and social media platforms to encourage the platforms to protect the brand safety of advertisers. As we’ve covered, that attack was successful. Even though his ExTwitter had put out a press release talking about how excited they were to “rejoin” GARM just weeks earlier, Musk went on to sue GARM, which was almost immediately shut down by the World Federation of Advertisers.
The report breaks down how this was a clear case of Jordan and Musk weaponizing the government to silence critical speech.
By March 2023, Twitter’s value had fallen from $44 billion to $20 billion. The reason for this decline in value is no mystery, given the facts outlined above. Nevertheless, the Majority launched an investigation into the advertisers which have declined to spend money on the platform, accusing them of “colluding” to hurt the company’s profits. Since then, the Majority has spent countless dollars and hours of staff time trying to figure out why advertisers might be hesitant to risk their brands’ reputations on a platform whose owner told them, in November 2023, to “Go fuck yourself.”
Chairman Jordan’s so-called investigation culminated in a July 2024 “interim report” which used cherry picked documents and misleading transcript excerpts to suggest that the committee had uncovered evidence of “collusion” when in fact the very opposite is true. In fact, the complete and contextualized documents and testimony show that the Global Alliance for Responsible Media and its member companies were engaged in a pro-competitive effort to address the substantial brand risk that harmful online content poses to advertisers and to consumers.
Chairman Jordan’s report had an audience of one: Elon Musk. In fact, the entire report seems like pretext for a lawsuit Musk filed against various advertising entities and ultimately to silence the advertisers who expressed concern about content on his platform. The resources of this Committee should not be directed to further pad a billionaire’s bottom line.In contrast, this minority report is intended for the American public, who are entitled to the truth about this investigation and about Chairman Jordan’s true aims and abuse of congressional oversight power.
It’s hard to imagine a more blatant example of a powerful government official abusing his authority to carry water for a political ally and major GOP donor. The fact that Jordan is doing this while sanctimoniously claiming to be fighting the “weaponization” of government is beyond parody.
As the report calls out:
For the past 20 months, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee has abused his oversight power and the rule of law to push an agenda that would pervert the free market and undermine individual companies’ independent decisions as to where to place advertisements online. The spread of illegal, harmful, abusive, and false and misleading content online results in actual harm, both online and offline. We are left to conclude that the Majority’s ultimate goal was not to conduct antitrust oversight as they claim, but rather to silence criticism of harmful online content and those who promote it, deter content moderation, and protect the ability to use mis- and disinformation campaigns to achieve political ends.
Ya think? This was obvious from the beginning, but almost entirely ignored by the credulous media that uncritically amplified Jordan’s false claims.
The report thoroughly debunks Jordan’s flimsy antitrust pretext and exposes his true aim: strong-arming companies into boosting Musk and his political allies.
It also calls out the irony of the committee that claims to be fighting weaponization, actually being the chief party weaponizing the government against speech:
The Majority is engaging in a transparently political effort to use the antitrust laws to benefit their allies by conferring upon them outcomes that they could not otherwise achieve in the marketplace. This is not just a misuse of the antitrust laws, but fundamentally subverts the goals of those laws. The irony could not be greater. While spending most of this Congress attacking the Biden administration’s so-called weaponization of government, the Majority here is trying to weaponize the antitrust laws under a highly dubious theory to override legitimate market outcomes.
It also calls out the MAGA trend of falsely claiming that content moderation or boycotts could possibly violate the First Amendment:
Finally, the Majority bandies about words like censorship, in a misguided effort to evoke the First Amendment. But as the Majority well knows, the First Amendment only applies to government action. And in this case, the only governmental burdening of speech is the Majority’s onslaught against GARM and its members. It is an effort to bully the advertisers into subsidizing firms whose content moderation policies put brands and businesses at risk. It is an attempt to hijack free speech, as well as antitrust, for political purposes.
If reality mattered, this report would be a bombshell. But, again, everyone seems to be living in a fog of nonsense, where anything the MAGA world says it’s doing, no matter how obviously false, is treated as genuine. And any time anyone calls out the lack of clothes on the emperor, it’s dismissed as sour grapes or “derangement syndrome.”
The report is thorough and detailed. It explains why companies might not want to advertise on ExTwitter for totally legitimate business reasons, calling out examples of big brands having their ads show up next to “pro-Nazi” content, and noting that consumers (the marketplace again!) will often punish companies whose advertisements support such hatred:
Now consider the category of misinformation that the Majority alleges GARM’s members misapply to the detriment of conservative-voiced content. The GARM framework defines misinformation as “the presence of verifiably false or willfully misleading content that is directly connected to user or societal harm.” Consumer surveys suggested that inappropriate content, including misinformation, negatively affects brand trust and purchase behavior. These results explained, in part, why advertisers are concerned about the nexus between brand safety and misinformation. Additional studies examined this nexus in more detail. A 2024 article in NATURE reported the results of an experiment which demonstrated that consumers are likely to reduce purchases from firms that advertise on websites that publish misinformation compared to firms that do not. Unlike the surveys which measured intention to change purchase behavior, subjects in this experiment made actual economic choices. Additional research on consumer reaction to misinformation was provided by the IPG Mediabrands and Zefr MAGNA Media Trials Study which found that “advertising next to misinformation led to wasted dollars for brands, eroded brand perception, and negatively impacted KPIs [key performance indicators].”
The challenges of directing ad placement to trustworthy sites and away from misinformation sites continues to loom large. The 2024 NATURE study found that of the 100 most active advertisers, an astounding 79.8 percent that used digital advertising platforms had advertisements placed in online misinformation outlets in a given week. The authors attributed the problem to the use of such platform systems that allocate advertising to such websites. Another study, by the Pew Research Center, suggested that “for every $2.16 in digital ad revenue sent to legitimate newspapers, U.S. advertisers are sending $1 to misinformation websites.”
In sum, online advertising is very important for advertisers and for the websites that provide and host content, many of whose business models depend on it. But harmful content is challenging the business models of advertisers, content providers, and platforms alike. Consumers associate the online content with the brands that advertise there. When a brand is advertised near harmful content, its value is undermined because most consumers believe that the brand knowingly chose that content and site for its advertising.
In other words, there are completely and totally understandable business reasons for advertisers to stop advertising on ExTwitter.
And all GARM was trying to do was help advertisers make sure that they didn’t risk angering customers by having ads appear next to highly controversial content. And they did so in a way that everyone involved knew was just creating more information and allowing advertisers (and social media platforms) to make their own final decisions:
GARM’s voluntary frameworks, which the biggest social media platforms helped develop, provide structures for analysis and created a common lexicon. Much like the terms of art in marketing or expressions in mathematics, a shared terminology facilitates communication that is foundational for constructive working relationships across organizations. Such terminology enhances transparency, making market transactions more efficient. The buyer better understands what sellers are offering in terms of brand safety and the seller better understands what buyers want. Both advertisers and platforms benefit from this common approach and independent decision making is improved.
Crucially, the frameworks do not dictate advertising outcomes. Applying those frameworks is an inherently subjective exercise that includes tailoring to the specific requirements of the brands and leads to outcomes that vary across GARM’s members. Juhl described how GroupM customizes its work in ad placement to reflect the specific needs of their advertiser clients:
GroupM works to place our clients’ ads on media pursuant to their goals, preferences, and target audiences, and we continually engage with our clients to understand their particular risk tolerance levels. These risk tolerances shift due to our clients’ own business conditions and how they view the current political and social environments. Clients shift priorities very quickly and it is our job to execute their strategy with speed and precision. We always follow our client brand’s ad placement wishes.
It is also important to recognize that the application of the GARM frameworks usually operates within a firm’s set of marketing policies and hence was only one consideration among many. These marketing policies vary by firm. Most were created before the GARM frameworks and continue to shape online advertising choices.
But, Jim Jordan and Elon Musk bent over backwards to pretend that it was “illegal collusion” that violates antitrust law. And this report says that’s ridiculous to anyone who looked at all the facts.
The Majority’s July 2024 Interim Report offers no direct evidence of an agreement among GARM and its members. Mere status as a member of GARM would not, without more, support a finding of a conspiracy. Consistent with the key Supreme Court precedents Matsushita Elec. Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp.1 and Monsanto Co. v. Spray-Rite Service Corp., a plaintiff would have to “present evidence tending to show that association members, in their individual capacities, consciously committed themselves to a common scheme designed to achieve an unlawful objective.” In contrast, GARM and its members are absolutely clear that their advertising decisions are made independently. As Unilever USA President Patel testified during the hearing,
I want to be very clear on one crucially-important fact. Unilever and Unilever alone controls our advertising spending. No platform has the right to our advertising dollars. As we look across the available advertising inventory, recognizing we do not have unlimited money to spend on advertising, we choose the channels, the platforms, and the outlets that give us the greatest commercial benefit for our advertising investments.
During questioning Patel further confirmed that, “A hundred percent, Unilever makes its own decisions,” and does not follow any outside group’s direction to avoid any outlet. This sentiment is echoed by GARM’s Rakowitz during his transcribed interview:
Q: But just to nail down that point, GARM doesn’t tell individual members—
A: Absolutely not.
Q: —what to do?
A: No, we do not.
Q: Or where to place ads?
A: No, we do not.
Q: Or where to avoid placing ads?
A: We do not.
These comments are consistent with the advertiser decision making process discussed in Part IIB.
As the report highlights, nothing about this represents a serious antitrust inquiry.
A serious antitrust inquiry would need to address the ease of reaching and sustaining an agreement. Two major obstacles—large numbers of participants and participants with diverse interests—have long been recognized by antitrust law as making collusive schemes less likely. In the GARM setting, overcoming these obstacles would loom large.
The real reason companies stopped advertising on ExTwitter is no grand conspiracy to suppress free speech. It was a simple business calculation. Advertising there is bad for business:
The Majority focused on alleged harm caused by the demonetization of its favored conservative-voices. They assert that this loss of revenue is caused by a large conspiracy involving GARM and its 100 plus members to suppress conservative-voiced online platforms and outlets by stopping advertising support. But the most compelling explanation for this revenue decline is apolitical. Advertisers want to attract and retain customers. When their advertising is placed next to harmful content the advertisement instead repels customers. Not surprisingly, advertisers gravitate to outlets that pose less risk to their brands. Again, this isn’t rocket science.
Instead, the much more obvious conclusion is the one that we’ve been shouting from the rooftops for the past few years: that it’s Jordan who is weaponizing the government to silence speech:
As with other of this Committee’s recent investigations, we are left to conclude that its ultimate goal was not to “conduct[] oversight of the adequacy and enforcement of U.S. antitrust laws” as they claim, but rather to silence criticism of harmful online content and those who promote it, deter content moderation, and protect the ability to use mis- and disinformation campaigns to achieve political ends. The Majority’s desperate ploy to launder their failed censorship arguments through an antitrust framing itself fails. The Majority’s actions have intimidated organizations who call attention to the prevalence of hate, disinformation, and other harmful or unlawful content online. Fostering a more transparent, accountable, and responsible digital environment is not only lawful, it is good for businesses, consumers and the general public. Chairman Jordan’s investigation and others like it will undermine this work and lead to the further deterioration of our information ecosystem and will threaten free speech.
Antitrust is not about choosing winners and losers. It is about ensuring a fair fight. In this instance we see that the Majority is willing to condemn any outcome that they do not like as being unfair and the outcome appears to involve both a category of supposed victims as well as a particular victim—X. In fact, this investigation originated after the Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, Chairman Jordan, and Elon Musk were talking and Musk said, “‘by the way, there’s this organization GARM, because GARM is harm.’ [sic] I [Jordan] never forgot that sentence.” No he did not. Jordan embarked on an investigation whose outcome was a foregone conclusion and for which the resulting report’s title [GARM’s Harm] was effectively supplied by Musk himself. Despite all of the investigation’s shortcomings, it excelled in one regard—providing taxpayer funded discovery for the richest man in the world and one of Trump’s biggest donors. A lawsuit launched by X just days after the Majority’s interim report was released began by touting that the conduct was “the subject of an active investigation” by the House Judiciary Committee before reproducing the fruits of the subcommittee’s fishing expedition in the form of a document demand. Perhaps this assault on legitimate business activity seems worth it to the Majority.
It’s pretty scathing as Congressional reports go.
In the end, this sordid saga illustrates the dangerous way that accusations of “censorship” and “collusion” are being cynically weaponized to bully companies into amplifying favored political content. Jordan and Musk’s campaign against GARM sets a troubling precedent.
By abusing the power of Congressional oversight to intimidate advertisers and platforms, they are effectively arguing that companies have an obligation to subsidize and support any speech, no matter how hateful or harmful, or else be accused of “censorship.” It’s an attempt to pervert the free market to serve their political agenda.
But as this report makes clear, advertisers’ decisions on where to place their ads are driven by legitimate business considerations about brand safety and consumer sentiment, not some nefarious plot to silence conservatives. The real threat to free speech is not content moderation or advertiser boycotts – it’s government officials like Jim Jordan trying to use their power to dictate what speech must be subsidized and supported.
Sadly, given the current media and political environment, it’s unlikely this report will get the attention it deserves. But for anyone who cares about the future of online speech, platform governance, and the abuse of government authority, it’s essential reading. It shines a harsh light on Jordan and Musk’s cynical, dishonest campaign and the damage it has done to free speech and the free market.
Two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg apologized for something he didn’t actually do to appease a bad faith actor demanding he take responsibility for something that didn’t happen. This week, he’s claiming that he’s done falsely apologizing to bad faith actors demanding accountability for things he’s not responsible for.
Pardon me, but I think I’ll wait for some actual evidence of this before I take it on faith that he’s a changed man.
There were plenty of times over the last decade that Mark Zuckerberg seemed both unwilling and unable to speak up about how content moderation / trust & safety actually worked. He was so easily battered down by bad faith political actors into issuing pointless apologies that it became a sort of common occurrence. Politicians began to realize they could capitalize on this kind of theater to their own benefit.
Over the course of that decade, there were many times when Zuck could have come out and more clearly explained the reality of these things: content moderation is impossible to do well at scale, mistakes will always be made, and some people will always disagree with some of our choices. As such, there are times that people will have reasonable criticisms of decisions the company has made, or policies it has chosen to prioritize, but it’s got nothing to do with bad faith, or partisan politics, or the woke mind virus, or anything like that at all.
It just has to do with the nature of content moderation at scale. There are many malicious actors out there, many calls are subjective in nature, and operationalizing rules across tens of thousands of content moderators to protect the health and safety of users on a site is going to be fraught with decisions people disagree with.
Zuckerberg could have taken that stance at basically any point in the last decade. He could have tried to share some of the nuances and trade-offs inherent in these choices. Yet, each and every time, he seemed to fold and play politics.
So, there’s one side of me that thinks his recent appearance on some podcast in which he suggests he’s done apologizing and now focused on being more open and honest is nice to hear.
The founder of Facebook has spent a lot of time apologizing for Facebook’s content moderation issues. But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control.
“Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”
Of course, that would be a hell of a lot more compelling if, literally two weeks ago, Zuckerberg hadn’t sent a totally spineless and craven apology for things that didn’t even happen to one of the most bad faith “just looking for someone else to blame” actors around: Jim Jordan.
So it’s a little difficult to believe that Zuck has actually turned over a new leaf regarding political posturing, caving, and apologizing for things he wasn’t actually responsible for. It just looks like he’s shifted which bad faith actors he’s willing to cave to.
The problem in all of this is that there are (obviously!) plenty of things that social media companies and their CEOs could do better to provide a better overall environment. And there are (obviously!) plenty of things that social media companies and their CEOs could do better to explain and educate the public about the realities of social media, trust & safety, and society itself.
There are all sorts of problems that are pinned on social media that are really society-level problems that governments have failed to deal with going back centuries. A real leader would strive to highlight the differences between the things that are societal level problems and platform level problems. A real leader would highlight ways in which society should be attacking some of those problems, and where and how social media platforms could assist.
But Zuckerberg isn’t doing any of that. He’s groveling before bad faith actors… and pretending that he’s done doing so. Mainly because those very same bad faith actors keep insisting (in a bad faith way) that Zuck’s previous apologies were because of other bad faith actors conspiring with Zuck to silence certain voices. Except that didn’t happen.
So forgive me for being a bit cynical in believing that Zuck is “done” apologizing or “done” caving to bad faith actors. The claim he’s making here appears to be explicitly about now caving to a new and different batch of bad faith actors.
Two bits of news came out of the letter Mark Zuckerberg sent to Rep. Jim Jordan this week (and how people responded to it), neither of which are what you’re likely to have heard about. First, Donald Trump seems to be accusing himself of rigging the 2020 election against himself.
And, second, Mark Zuckerberg has absolutely no spine when it comes to Republican pressure on Meta’s moderation practices. He falsely plays into their fundamentally misleading framing, all to win some temporary political favors by immediately caving to pressure from the GOP.
You may have seen a bunch of headlines in the past couple of days claiming that Mark Zuckerberg “admitted” that the Biden White House pressured him about “censoring” content and he wished he’d stood up to them more. It got plenty of coverage. Unfortunately, almost none of that coverage is accurately reporting what happened, what’s new, and what was actually said.
The reality is pretty straightforward: Mark Zuckerberg folded like a cheap card table, facing coercive pressure from Rep. Jim Jordan to modify Meta’s moderation practices. What he says misleadingly plays into Jordan’s mendaciously misleading campaign. In short, Zuckerberg’s claim that he would stand up to government pressure on moderation is undermined by the fact that he’s revealing this literally while caving to government pressure on moderation.
First, it’s necessary to understand the history. It’s no secret that the White House sought to persuade social media companies to adjust their content moderation practices. They said so publicly. Hell, there was just a big, giant, massive Supreme Court case about that, where the details of government requests to social media were on full display.
But, as the Supreme Court Justices themselves made clear during the oral arguments, the White House reaching out to media providers and trying to persuade them on editorial decisions is nothing new, nor is it problematic. The only thing that matters is if the government uses coercive techniques, in which it threatened the company or punished the company if it failed to comply.
Justices Kavanaugh and Kagan were talking about this during the oral arguments:
JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: You’re speaking on behalf of the United States. Again, my experience is the United States, in all its manifestations, has regular communications with the media to talk about things they don’t like or don’t want to see or are complaining about factual inaccuracies.
[….]
JUSTICE KAGAN: I mean, can I just understand because it seems like an extremely expansive argument, I must say, encouraging people basically to suppress their own speech. So, like Justice Kavanaugh, I’ve had some experience encouraging press to suppress their own speech.
You just wrote about editorial. Here are the five reasons you shouldn’t write another one. You just wrote a story that’s filled with factual errors. Here are the 10 reasons why you shouldn’t do that again.
I mean, this happens literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.
And just the fact that the Supreme Court did not see any evidence of this being coercive should say something.
Nothing in what Zuckerberg said changes any of that. He simply repeats what was already known and already public: that, yes, White House officials sought to persuade Meta in how it handled some moderation elements. Much of that pressure was public, and even the pressure that was private has been revealed before.
Remember, Jim Jordan has spent the last couple of years weaponizing the House Judiciary Committee to misleadingly claim that the government was “weaponized” to suppress conservative speech. He’s sent dozens upon dozens of subpoenas, almost all of which misleadingly demand responses or data based on his false belief that basic, fundamental trust & safety work is somehow an attack on free speech rights.
But make no mistake about Jordan’s end goal here: it is to prevent websites from ever doing anything to try to counter the spread of disinformation. We’re not even talking about removing or blocking content. He doesn’t want there to be any effort to fact check or debunk nonsense. And that’s because the party that he is a part of is the largest producer and purveyor of complete and utter bullshit. And having people point that out is seen as an attack.
So Jordan has framed any attempt to refute nonsense as “an attack on free speech.” Tragically, much of the media (and plenty of tech execs) have fallen into this trap and accepted Jordan’s framing.
Finally, that brings us to Zuckerberg’s letter from this week. In it, he admits (again) what has been widely known and widely reported on, and was central to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case: that some people in the White House sought to persuade Meta to take Covid misinfo more seriously.
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.
So what is actually revealed here? Literally nothing new at all. It was already widely reported that the White House tried to persuade Meta to be more responsive. And there were reasons for this. People were dying from Covid, and internal documents show that Zuckerberg himself was hoping that Facebook would be helpful in getting people vaccinated. But the platform was being bombarded with conspiracy theories, lies, and nonsense that was misleading people into putting lives at risk.
So, yes, of course the White House would reach out to Meta and suggest that the platform should do better in stopping the flood of misleading, dangerous info. None of that should be revelatory or even noteworthy.
And if you read what Zuckerberg says here, he still says that they didn’t do anything because of pressure from the White House: “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decision, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement…”
But then he says, “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
And what does that even mean? First of all, Meta was pretty fucking outspoken. When Joe Biden accused Meta of “killing people,” Meta went all out in calling that claim crazy. They said that the Biden administration was “looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals” and “we will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts.”
So, what’s new here? It was widely known that the White House wanted Meta to be more responsible about Covid and vaccine misinfo. They said so publicly and privately. The private emails were widely reported on and subject to a landmark Supreme Court case that was just decided less than two months ago. None of that is new.
Zuckerberg also says that they made their own decisions and it wasn’t due to White House pressure, which confirms what was said during the Supreme Court case.
The only “new” thing here is Zuck suggesting he regrets not being more aggressive in… what…? In making sure more people saw misinformation that might lead them to make bad decisions and get sick and possibly die? And again, it’s not even that Meta didn’t push back. They pushed back hard.
And yet, Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary are claiming that this was some big revelation:
So, again, neither of the first two points are new or even meaningful. It was public knowledge that the White House spoke to Meta. And, of course Meta moderated (not censored) the speech of Americans, because those Americans violated Meta’s policies. And, as a private entity, they’re free to do that. That’s American freedom, something Jim Jordan seems unable to comprehend.
Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story, that’s the next paragraph of Zuckerberg’s letter:
In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.
Again, literally nothing in this is new. All of this was known at the time. Indeed, Meta admitted it at the time and admitted that it had probably been too quick to limit the spread of the story (just as Twitter had done, admitting the very next day that the policy was a bad one and needed to change). We’ve covered all this in great detail before.
Furthermore, Zuckerberg said this exact same thing on Joe Rogan two years ago. This also led people to falsely claim that he admitted that they blocked the spreading of that NY Post story due to pressure from the White House, even though he said no such thing.
Both times, he said that the FBI gave general warnings about “hack and leak” operations that the Russians were working on, which is no surprise given that the Russians did exactly that during the 2016 election in releasing the DNC emails. The FBI (unsurprisingly!) also said that there were a number of potential targets, including Hunter Biden. And that was also obvious. Anyone in the President’s family and political circle would be obvious targets. At no point has anyone suggested that the FBI said that they should suppress this particular story.
And, remember, the original Hunter Biden story was weakly sourced. Multiple news organizations, including Fox News, had turned down the story. That was because there were all sorts of questions about its legitimacy. And given what had happened in the past, it seemed wise to be cautious.
Indeed, these days Republicans seem oddly quiet about news organizations still holding back on reporting on the documents that were hacked from top Republicans like Roger Stone by the Iranians in this election cycle. Is Jim Jordan going to accuse companies of illegally interfering in the election because they won’t publish those documents that are embarrassing to Trump? Why the silence Jim? Oh right.
Even more to the point, at the time of that NY Post story, the Trump administration was in charge. It was October of 2020, a month before the 2020 election. So, this “truth” from Donald Trump is absolutely insane, because he appears to be accusing himself of “rigging” the election against himself:
If you can’t see that, it’s Donald Trump posting on Truth Social:
“Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee.
Again, that is Trump saying “the White House” in 2020 “rigged” the Presidential election. So far, the only reporter I’ve seen call this out is Philip Bump at the Washington Post. This is Trump being so confused, he’s accusing himself of rigging the election.
Finally, Zuckerberg’s letter concludes with even more nonsense.
Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They were designed to be non-partisan spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.
Why is he even bringing up his personal donations if this is about Meta? And, furthermore, is he really saying that he won’t do any more donations simply because “some people believe” that donations for safe voting benefit one party or another?
This is the most spineless response to a mendacious, targeted campaign by a politician who is weaponizing the power of the government to pressure a media company over its editorial policies. And Zuck folds like a cheap card table. And it’s doubly ironic, because part of that folding is claiming he won’t fold again (something he didn’t even do in the first place, but is doing now).
Oh, and of course, Elon jumps in to say this “sounds like a First Amendment violation.”
Dude, the Supreme Court literally just covered this in a case that talked quite a bit about your own site and said (pretty fucking clearly) that the record did not support any claim of a First Amendment violation.
All of this is stupid. That letter is written in the worst possible way. While it does not state anything fundamentally false, it makes it sound like things that have been public knowledge for years are somehow a new admission. It further directly enables idiots like Trump, Jordan, and Musk to claim false things about what happened. And, finally, it just contributes to a totally unnecessary news cycle.
The only actual “news” out of all this is (1) Zuckerberg has no spine and simply cannot stand up to bad faith government pressure to change his moderation practices when it comes from Republicans (he was fine doing so when it came from Democrats) and (2) Donald Trump has accused himself of rigging his own election against himself.
Zuckerberg has to know how this would play out. After all, the same misleading reaction happened two years ago when he went on Rogan’s podcast. The only reasonable interpretation of this is that he sent this letter, knowing how it would be interpreted, to give Jordan/Trump red meat to continue believing their own false and misleading claims in case Trump wins in the fall. It’s stupid and cynical, but that’s the kind of politics Meta seems to play these days.
Up is down, left is right, day is night. And now, to Jim Jordan and Elon Musk, clear, direct government censorship is, apparently, “free speech.”
This isn’t a huge surprise, but on Thursday, the World Federation of Advertising shut down GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, in response to legal threats from ExTwitter and Rumble, and a bullshit Congressional investigation led by Jim Jordan.
As we have detailed, GARM was setup following the mosque shootings in New Zealand, which was livestreamed. Brand advertisers were accused (arguably unfairly) of profiting off of such things, so they put together this alliance to share information about best practices on social media advertising for brand safety.
GARM was specifically a way for advertisers to set up those best practices, share them with each other, but also to share them with social media sites, to say “hey, this is the kind of trust & safety processes we expect if we’re going to advertise.”
I disagreed with GARM about lots of things, but in a free market, where there is free speech, they should absolutely be allowed to create best practices and to talk with platforms and advertisers and advocate for better trust & safety practices in order for brands to feel safe that their ads won’t show up next to dangerous content.
All of it was entirely voluntary. Advertisers didn’t have to abide by the standards, nor did platforms. This was literally just part of the marketplace of ideas. Some advertisers advocated for efforts to be made to protect their brand safety, and some platforms agreed while others, like Rumble, did not.
All GARM was at its core was advertisers using their own freedom of expression and rights of association to try to put some pressure on platforms to be better stewards, so that advertisers weren’t putting their brands at risk. You can (perhaps reasonably!) argue that they pushed too hard, or some of their requests were unreasonable, but it’s their free speech rights.
As we’ve detailed over the last month, ExTwitter had regularly used GARM’s standards to try to convince advertisers they were “safe” and officially “excitedly” rejoined GARM as a member just last month. A few days later, Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee released a blisteringly stupid and misleading report, falsely claiming that GARM was engaged in antitrust-violating collusion to punish conservative media. None of that was ever true.
However, Elon announced that he would be suing GARM and hoped that criminal charges would be filed against GARM, perhaps not realizing his own organization had rejoined GARM a week earlier and touted that relationship in its effort to attract advertisers. Earlier this week, he carried through on that plan and sued GARM for alleged antitrust violations.
The lawsuit is absolutely ridiculous. It assumes that because GARM, at times, criticized Elon’s handling of trust & safety issues, that was a form of collusion that abused its monopoly position to get advertisers to stop advertising on ExTwitter.
It is one of the most entitled, spoiled brat kind of lawsuits you’ll ever see. Not only does it seem to suggest that not advertising on ExTwitter is an antitrust violation, it assumes that the only reason that advertisers would remove their ads from the site was not due to any actions by the company or Elon, but rather that it must be because GARM organized a boycott (which, notably, none of the evidence shows they did). One thing is quite clear from all this: Elon seems incapable of recognizing that the consequences of his own actions fall on him. He insists it must be everyone else’s fault.
Indeed, the sense of entitlement shines through from those involved in this whole process.
For example, Rumble’s CEO Chris Pavlovski more or less admitted that if you turn him down when he asks companies to advertise, you would now get sued. The sheer, unadulterated entitlement on display here is incredible:
Rumble had sued GARM alongside ExTwitter, using some of the same lawyers that Elon did. When tweeting out the details to prove that these advertisers should be added to his lawsuit, Pavlovski only showed perfectly friendly emails from companies saying “hey, look, advertising on your site won’t be good for our reputation, sorry.”
That’s not illegal. It’s not collusion. It’s the marketplace of ideas saying “hey, we don’t want to associate with you.” But, according to Rumble, that alone deserves a lawsuit.
Anyway, the World Federation of Advertisers has apparently given in to this lawfare from Elon and Jim Jordan and announced on Thursday that they were shutting down GARM because of all of this.
In other words, Elon, Jordan, and others have used the power of the state, both in the form of lawsuits and congressional investigations, to browbeat advertisers into no longer speaking up about ways to keep social media sites safe for their brands.
This is the exact opposite of free speech. It’s literally using the power of the state to shut up companies which were expressing views that Elon and Jordan didn’t like.
And, so, of course, they and their fans are celebrating this state-backed censorship as a “win for free speech.” It’s ridiculously Orwellian.
This is not a “win” for the First Amendment in any way. It is, in every way, the opposite. The House Judiciary Committee, under Jim Jordan, abused the power of the state to shut up companies from talking about which sites they felt were safe for brands or what those sites could do to be better.
And, of course, a bunch of other very foolish people repeated more of this kind of nonsense, including some of MAGA’s favorite journalists, who pretend to support free speech. Ben Shapiro called it an “important win for free speech principles,” which is just disconnected from reality.
Linda Yaccarino claims it proves that “no small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized.” This makes no sense at all. No small group monopolized anything. They just tried to put in place some basic best practices to protect their brands and no one had to agree with them at all (and many didn’t).
And if Linda or Elon thinks this will magically make advertisers want to come back to ExTwitter, they’re even more delusional than I thought. Who would ever want to advertise on a platform that sued advertisers for leaving?
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor Discord. In our Bonus Chat at the end of the episode, Mike speaks to Juliet Shen and Camille Francois about the Trust & Safety Tooling Consortium at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, and the importance of open source tools for trust and safety.
Remember last month when ExTwitter excitedly “rejoined GARM” (the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an advertising consortium focused on brand safety)? And then, a week later, after Rep. Jim Jordan released a misleading report about GARM, Elon Musk said he was going to sue GARM and hoped criminal investigations would be opened?
Unsurprisingly, Jordan has now ratcheted things up a notch by sending investigative demands to a long list of top advertisers associated with GARM. The letter effectively accuses these advertisers of antitrust violations for choosing not to advertise on conservative media sites, based on GARM’s recommendations on how to best protect brand safety.
The link there shows all the letters, but we’ll just stick with the first one, to Adidas. The letter doesn’t make any demands specifically about ExTwitter, but does name the GOP’s favorite media sites, and demands to know whether any of these advertisers agreed not to advertise on those properties. In short, this is an elected official demanding to know why a private company chose not to give money to media sites that support that elected official:
Was Adidas Group aware of the coordinated actions taken by GARM toward news outlets and podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience, The Daily Wire, Breitbart News, or Fox News, or other conservative media? Does Adidas Group support GARM’s coordinated actions toward these news outlets and podcasts?
Jordan is also demanding all sorts of documents and answers to questions. He is suggesting strongly that GARM’s actions (presenting ways that advertisers might avoid, say, having their brands show up next to neo-Nazi content) were a violation of antitrust law.
This is all nonsense. First of all, choosing not to advertise somewhere is protected by the First Amendment. And there are good fucking reasons not to advertise on media properties most closely associated with nonsense peddling, extremist culture wars, and just general stupidity.
Even more ridiculous is that the letter cites NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, which is literally the Supreme Court case that establishes that group boycotts are protected speech. It’s the case that says not supporting a business for the purpose of protest, while economic activity, is still protected speech and can’t be regulated by the government (and it’s arguable that what does GARM does is even a boycott at all).
As the Court noted, in holding that organizing a boycott was protected by the First Amendment:
The First Amendment similarly restricts the ability of the State to impose liability on an individual solely because of his association with another.
But, of course, one person who is quite excited is Elon Musk. He quote tweeted (they’re still tweets, right?) the House Judiciary’s announcement of the demands with a popcorn emoji:
So, yeah. Mr. “Free Speech Absolutist,” who claims the Twitter files show unfair attempts by governments to influence speech, now supports the government trying to pressure brands into advertising on certain media properties. It’s funny how the “free speech absolutist” keeps throwing the basic, fundamental principles of free speech out the window the second he doesn’t like the results.
That’s not supporting free speech at all. But, then again, for Elon to support free speech, he’d first have to learn what it means, and he’s shown no inclination of ever doing that.
Gather ’round, children, and let me tell you a tale of rate limiting, misinterpreted screenshots, and how half the internet lost its mind over a pretty standard Twitter error. This error was then interpreted through an extremely partisan political prism, leading previous arguments to flip political sides based on who was involved.
The desire to attack editorial discretion knows no political bounds. Partisan attacks on free speech seem to flip the second the players switch.
I think it’s become pretty clear over the past couple of years that I’m no fan of how Elon Musk runs ExTwitter. He makes terrible decision after terrible decision. Indeed, he seems to have a knack for doing the wrong thing pretty consistently.
But this week there’s been a hubbub of anger and nonsense that I think is totally unfair to Musk and ExTwitter. Musk did come out in support of Donald Trump a couple weeks back and has gone quite far in making sure that everyone on the platform is bombarded with pro-Trump messages. I already called out the hypocrisy of GOP lawmakers who attacked the former management of Twitter for “bias” as they did way, way less than that.
But, as you might have heard, on Sunday Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race and effectively handed his spot over to Kamala Harris. The “@BidenHQ” account on ExTwitter was renamed and rebranded “@HarrisHQ.” Not surprisingly, a bunch of users on the site clicked to follow the account.
At some point on Monday, some people received a “rate limiting” error message, telling them that the user was “unable to follow more people at this time.”
Lots of people quickly jumped to the conclusion that Musk was deliberately blocking people from following Harris. And, yes, I totally understand the instinct to believe that, but there’s little to suggest that’s actually what happened.
First off, rate limiting is a very frequently used tool in trust & safety efforts to try to stop certain types of bad behavior (often spamming). And it’s likely that ExTwitter has some sort of (probably shoddily done) rate limiting tool that kicks in if any particular account suddenly gets a flood of new followers.
Having an account — especially an older account that changes names — suddenly get a large flood of new followers is a pattern consistent with spam accounts (often a spammer will somehow take over an old account, change the name, and then flood it with bot followers). It’s likely that, to combat that, ExTwitter has systems that kick in after a certain point and rate limit the followers.
The message which blames the follower might just be shoddy programming on ExTwitter’s part. Or it might be because part of the “signal” found in this pattern is that when a ton of accounts follow an old account like this, it often means all those follower accounts are now being flagged as potential bots (again, spam accounts flood newly obtained accounts with bot followers).
In other words, these rate limiting messages are entirely consistent with normal trust & safety automated systems.
Of course, most users immediately assumed the worst. Many posted their screenshots and insisted it was Musk putting his thumb on the scales. The New Republic (which is usually better than this) rushed in with an article where at least the headline suggests Musk is doing this intentionally: “Trump-Lover Elon Musk Is Already Causing Kamala Harris Problems.”
Then, some site called The Daily Boulder (?!?) made it worse by misinterpreting a tweet by Musk as supposedly admitting to doing something. The Daily Boulder report is very misleading in multiple ways. First, it falsely states that users trying to follow Harris got a “something went wrong” error, when they actually got the rate limiting error shown above. The “something went wrong” error was from something else.
After the @BidenHQ account was changed to @HarrisHQ, if you tried to go directly to @BidenHQ, rather than redirect, Twitter just showed an error message saying “Something went wrong.” Elon screenshotted that and said “Sure did.”
This is a joke. Musk is joking that “something went wrong” with Joe Biden and/or the Biden campaign. Not that something went wrong with anyone trying to follow the Harris campaign.
The Daily Boulder piece confused the two different error messages. It seemed to think (incorrectly) that the screenshot Musk posted was of the Harris campaign account when it was the Biden one (I get that this is a bit confusing because the Biden account became the Harris account, but they don’t “redirect” if you go straight to the old name).
Either way, tons of Harris supporters flipped out and insisted that Musk was up to no good and was interfering. And, as much as I think Musk would have no issue doing something, nothing in this suggests anything done deliberately (indeed, I’ve tried to follow/unfollow/refollow the HarrisHQ account multiple times since Monday with no problem).
Still, Democrat Jerry Nadler has already called for an investigation, making him no better than Jim Jordan. Tragically, that NBC article fails to link to Nadler’s actual letter, leaving me to do their work for them. Here it is.
The letter is addressed to Jim Jordan, asking him to investigate this issue. That’s because Jordan is the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Nadler is the top Democrat on the committee but is effectively powerless without Jordan’s approval. The most charitable version of this is that Nadler is trolling Jordan, given all of Jordan’s hearings insisting that bias in the other direction was obviously illegal but his unwillingness to do so when bias is on the other foot.
Indeed, some of the letter directly calls out Jordan’s older statements when the accusations went in the other direction:
If true, such action would amount to egregious censorship based on political and viewpoint discrimination—issues that this Committee clearly has taken very seriously.
As you have aptly recognized in the past: “Big Tech’s role in shaping national and international public discourse today is well-known.” Against this import, you have criticized tech platforms for alleged political discrimination. As you wrote in letters to several “Big Tech” companies: “In some cases, Big Tech’s ‘heavy-handed censorship’ has been ‘use[d] to silence prominent voices’ and to ‘stifle views that disagree with the prevailing progressive consensus.’” In your view, platform censorship is particularly harmful to the American public because, “[b]y suppressing free speech and intentionally distorting public debate in the modern town square, ideas and policies were no longer fairly tested and debated on their merits.” Ironically, X’s CEO Elon Musk himself has expressed similar sentiment: “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.”
Given your long track record of fighting against political discrimination on the platform “town squares” of American discourse, I trust that you will join me in requesting additional information from X regarding this apparent censorship of a candidate for President of the United States. The Committee should immediately launch an investigation and request at a minimum the following information from X.
But still, even if you’re trolling, Congress shouldn’t be investigating any company for their editorial choices. The answer to this weaponization of the government should not be even more weaponization of the government.
Which brings us to the final point in all of this. Even if it were true that Musk were doing this deliberately (and, again, there is no evidence to support that), it would totally be within his and ExTwitter’s First Amendment rights to do so.
I understand this upsets some people, but if it upsets you, think back to how you felt when Twitter banned Donald Trump. If you’re mad about this, I’m guessing there’s a pretty high likelihood you supported that move, right? That was also protected by the First Amendment. Platforms have First Amendment rights over who they associate with and who they platform. Twitter could choose to remove President Trump. ExTwitter could choose to remove or block the Harris campaign.
That’s how freedom works.
And to answer one other point that I saw a few people raise, no, this also would not be an “in kind contribution” potentially violating election law. We already went through this a few years back when the GOP whined that Google was giving Democrats in-kind contributions by filtering more GOP fundraiser emails to spam (based on their own misreading of a study). Both the FEC and the courts pointed out that this was not an in-kind contribution and was not illegal. The court pointed out that such filtering is clearly protected under Section 230.
The same is true here.
It’s fine to point out that this is a dumb way to handle issues. Or that ExTwitter should have made sure that people could follow the newly dubbed HarrisHQ account. But I haven’t seen anything that looks out of the ordinary, and I think people’s willingness to leap to the worst possible explanation for anything Musk related has gone too far here.
But even worse is Nadler’s call for an investigation. Even if it was just to mock Jordan’s other investigations, there’s no reason to justify such nonsense with more nonsense.
I’m curious how Republicans would react if AOC suddenly sought to hold a hearing questioning Elon Musk’s bias in endorsing and promoting Donald Trump on ExTwitter. I imagine there would be apocalyptic outrage and nonstop cries of tyranny over such a blatant abuse of power to punish someone for their political views.
And they’d be right.
But it’s striking that no one batted an eye when the Republicans did that over the past few years.
And yet, Congress held multiple hearings, in which Republican senators and congressional reps would drag the CEOs of the companies into hours-long hearings to demand to know why they were “censoring” conservative speech and to harangue them for their biases.
As we said at the time, this was deeply problematic and an attack on free speech (something you’ll never hear any of the free speech grifter crew ever mention). In one hearing, the CEOs were asked to reveal the political registrations of their employees, which is none of anyone’s business.
Either way, as things stand right now, Elon (who once insisted that Twitter must remain “neutral”) has loudly endorsed (and promised to fund the campaign of) Donald Trump.
Since then, his ExTwitter feed is just a non-stop flood of pro-Trump content.
And, to be clear, he is absolutely free to do this. That is his free speech. And also, ExTwitter, as a company, also has its own free speech rights to do the same exact thing.
Meanwhile, companies like Meta have chosen to hire one of the main authors of the Project 2025 plan from Heritage Foundation, which is the playbook of authoritarian vengeance and retribution planned for the second Trump administration. The biggest VCs in Silicon Valley are all lining up behind Trump under the cynical belief that a chaotic 2nd term will somehow help the tech industry.
It’s almost as if the idea that the industry were just bastions of leftist thought, who used their power to stifle conservatives was always overblown nonsense, used to try to punish the companies for their own (and their employees’) speech.
So, why isn’t Congress calling for investigations?
I mean, obviously, the answer is that it was all grandstanding nonsense for the ignorant. It was all for show, control, and power. It was never actually about policy, because Washington DC these days isn’t about policy. It’s pure politics of power.
And, again, let me be clear: it would be a travesty for anyone to investigate Elon’s company (or the other platforms) for bias now. It would be an attack on the platforms and their owners for exercising their First Amendment rights. But it was equally bad the last few years as well, and that didn’t stop the Republicans in Congress from doing so. Nor were there many voices raised in protest about the types of questions they were asked, because attacking tech was seen as a bipartisan game (though the attacks were different).
So, of course, I’m not really calling on Congress to go through that nonsense again. But it does seem worth pointing out the utter hypocrisy of those who called and cheered on those show trials and how they will never even think about doing the same thing now.
It’s almost as if Congress isn’t concerned with the actual policy issues, but rather abusing their power to harass those they view as political opponents.
Elon Musk’s ExTwitter just set a new speed record: from enthusiastic joiner of an advertising coalition to potential plaintiff against the same organization in just over a week.
Sometimes, timing is everything.
This week has been a travel week for me, so on Tuesday evening, I wrote up a short article on last week’s news that ExTwitter had “rejoined GARM.” GARM is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is a loose coalition focused on brand safety for advertisers, such that their ads are less likely to appear next to, say, neo-Nazi content.
The main focus of my post was that there was almost no way that anyone should believe that ExTwitter’s decision to rejoin GARM was a sincere statement that ExTwitter would now take brand safety and GARM’s recommendations seriously. Instead, I noted that whenever ExTwitter was desperate for advertisers to sign on, its advertising execs (Linda Yaccarino’s underlings) would tout its compliance with GARM guidelines. But then Elon would do something fucking crazy and drive away advertisers again.
I even predicted, “sooner or later (probably sooner) Elon will do something horrible…” I should have known that it would happen so soon that it was before I could even post my article.
Anyway, I wrote that Tuesday evening and scheduled it to go up on Techdirt on Thursday afternoon, since I’d be traveling and without internet access for large segments of time this week.
Little did I know that on Wednesday, before my post went up, Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary would release an astoundingly stupid “report” claiming that GARM was an antitrust-violating cartel that was pressuring websites into censoring conservatives.
And, in response to a tweet showing just a clip of some nonsense testimony at the House hearing about this report, Elon Musk announced on Thursday morning (before my post went up) that ExTwitter “has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators” (meaning GARM, its organizers, and its members) and also said that “hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.”
Yes, that’s Elon Musk saying that he plans to file a civil lawsuit against GARM and its “collaborators” and hopes that state AGs will file criminal lawsuits against the very organization HIS COMPANY REJOINED JUST A WEEK EARLIER and celebrated with a hyped-up tweet:
So, last week ExTwitter was “excited to announce” that it’s rejoined GARM, and this week Elon says that GARM’s leaders should be criminally prosecuted, and he planned to sue them himself.
Cool, cool.
I can just imagine how Linda Yaccarino must feel about this. She clearly orchestrated the return to GARM as part of her desperate push to lure back advertisers.
But let’s be clear about this. Companies have their own First Amendment rights not to associate with anyone they want. And that includes not advertising on websites where your ads might show up next to controversial content, disinformation, or just general nonsense. Many companies recognize that it is bad for business to have advertisements showing up next to neo-Nazi content, or just plain old disinformation.
Private companies choosing not to advertise is not a violation of any law, civil or criminal. Private organizations setting up guidelines for brand safety is not an antitrust violation. Private organizations choosing not to advertise on the site formerly known as Twitter is an expression of their own First Amendment rights not to associate with whatever nonsense Elon is promoting these days.
Anyway, all that effort that Yaccarino put into “rejoining GARM” last week just went up in smoke. She was trying to convince advertisers that ExTwitter was a safe place for brand advertising, but now Elon is saying ExTwitter will be suing GARM and pushing for criminal prosecutions of everyone involved in GARM.
Which now includes Elon Musk’s ExTwitter as of last week. Can’t wait to see Elon sue himself.
What a clusterfuck of stupidity.
And I’m sure that it won’t be long before an Andrew Bailey of Missouri or a Ken Paxton of Texas opens an “investigation” into GARM (the group that Elon Musk’s company “excitedly” rejoined just last week).
Hilariously, this would be an actual First Amendment violation, in that it would be a government agency starting a criminal investigation for the pretty clear express purpose of intimidating companies out of expressing themselves.
Remember when Elon said he was against governments pressuring companies about their speech? Now he’s telling them to do that, but just to organizations he doesn’t like (even though his own company just joined the very same organization).
So, just to recap: last week, Elon’s company rejoined GARM, the advertising coalition to help make sure platforms are a safe place for brand advertisers to advertise. This week, the House Judiciary Committee falsely claimed that the First Amendment-protected rights of companies not to advertise on ExTwitter was an antitrust violation, leading to “First Amendment absolutist” Elon Musk saying he’s going to sue the very organization his company just “excitedly” joined. And, to top it all off, Elon hopes that states will open criminal investigations into this activity — an act that would actually violate the First Amendment rights of GARM and those involved with it. Which includes Elon Musk’s own company.
I should have stayed off the internet even longer.
