It’s not Twitter any more: your brand needs to eXit Musk’s binfire
Joe Goulcher once lived and breathed brand Twitter. Now, he believes that with every passing day, it shifts from unpalatable to unconscionable. Will you be leaving?
While X was launching a far-reaching lawsuit against lapsed advertisers that could potentially have a chilling effect on brand safety, the UK courts were processing the first of 900 people arrested for far-right riots stoked up on social media and, particularly, X.
While legacy media too has dabbled in white supremacist rhetoric with staggering recklessness, none of them are actively platforming “Tommy Robinson” - the new face of National Front in 2024. He was old news. His account was rightly deactivated by Twitter years ago for inciting racial hatred and radicalizing users. But now he is back and bigger than ever. One of the first things Elon Musk did in his takeover and crusade for “free speech” was to reinstate several high-profile accounts like Tommy’s that had been banned for some of the most hideous, racist content in the public domain. Even Instagram and Facebook retain their Tommy bans.
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If that was not bad enough, can any case be made for Musk actually directly replying to Robinson, amplifying it to his 193 million followers and countless more feeds he’s forced himself into? According to research published by Tortoise, Robinson’s posts were viewed 1.2 billion times in the three months to August.
Or for Musk repeating that ‘civil war’ is coming to the UK amid riots?
This is beyond “free speech” now.
We’re even beyond “well, some of these angry people have a point, even if this is the morally wrong way to go about it.”
When angry mobs drag people from their homes, control traffic based on skin color, and set fire to refugee shelters full of children, we’re beyond the “marketplace of ideas.” These people bring weapons to the debate club.
Racists have been emboldened and amplified enough to openly use this tech to mobilize, travel the country and strike fear into the hearts of communities in what can only be described as pogroms. They quote “the boats coming in,” the “invasion of immigrants,” and the “refugees” - despite the vast majority of people in the firing line being British Asian, and Black people (not that this should make any difference).
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Does any of this sound familiar?
It’s the language of the far right, and the more it’s allowed to be used, the more it is used in defense of burning down libraries and barricading refugees in burning buildings. These are the people Elon Musk is signal boosting, inviting back into the discourse, and allowing to self-verify.
What does that have to do with me?
If you’re reading The Drum, you’re probably a marketer. You’ll be associated with a brand or client still using X in some way. Are you OK with your brand being on there? I bet you’re having second thoughts right about now.
Here’s a thought experiment.
If you were to disregard all the time and effort you’d put into Twitter over the years, could you now argue that it is worth launching your brand there today? I doubt it; we are falling victim to the sunken cost fallacy, but it is now time to cut our losses and run.
The platform is amplifying dog whistles, and real people in the real world are hearing them. So now it is time for you to get real – if your brand is on X, you’re now complicit. If you’re one of X’s dwindling advertisers, you are on the hook for whatever chaos the app sows. Your next ‘wake-up call’ will be thugs on your street, attempting to murder your neighbors.
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After showing his hand years ago, Musk’s X is now seemingly radicalizing users, including perhaps himself. There is no longer any pretense of being apolitical either; he is now bankrolling and even ‘interviewing’ the Trump campaign. That’s a lot of free reach for someone previously banned from the app for using it to allegedly incite the January 6 violence that claimed the lives of at least seven people.
Freedom of speech, without limitations, kills.
In 2015, the UN’s human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said this in response to The Sun columnist Katie Hopkins, describing migrants as “cockroaches”: “History has shown us time and again the dangers of demonizing foreigners and minorities, and it is extraordinary and deeply shameful to see these types of tactics being used in a variety of countries, simply because racism and xenophobia are so easy to arouse in order to win votes or sell newspapers.”
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The “global town square” is now ironically more like our real-life town squares, filled up with goose-stepping racist mentalists.
Get your brands off of X. Your next wake-up call will be even worse than we’ve seen so far.