Musk is making massive blunders in his take over of Twitter. It’s great fun to point and laugh. Which I will happily do. It’s an opportunity to show him (& the rest of the world) why his definition of “free speech” is juvenile and harmful. It’s also a time to point out that when social media companies fail to act on known harmful content, there should be consequences.
Showing companies the financial consequences of their failure to act on harmful rhetoric is a powerful tool for change. It’s one of the methods that I have developed and taught multiple groups & people for the last 15 years.
Bloggers Take on Talk Radio Hosts — New York Times January 15, 2007
A San Francisco talk radio station pre-empted three hours of programming on Friday in response to a campaign by bloggers who have recorded extreme comments by several hosts and passed on digital copies to advertisers.
The lead blogger, who uses the name Spocko, said that he and other bloggers had contacted more than 30 advertisers on KSFO-AM to inform them of comments made on the air and to ask them to pull their ads.
The activist groups and individuals that I have worked with over the years like Color of Change, Free Press, and Angelo Carusone, (now the head of Media Matters for America) have used Musk’s failure to understand the harm caused by violating Twitter’s own terms and conditions around safety to convince advertisers to leave the platform.
Musk’s Paul Pelosi tweet might cost him billions in lost revenue
Musk tried to blame the activists for advertisers leaving, but just like my advertiser alert campaign in 2006, the advertisers looked at the situation and made their own decision to stop advertising.
Musk’s response reminded me of how the management of the RW radio station KSFO responded when I alerted the advertisers of the violent rhetoric coming from their hosts. First they told the advertisers that it wasn’t true, but the advertisers heard for themselves. Then they said the hosts were joking, but I had enough examples to prove that they were serious, including audio clips of them saying, ‘I’m not joking!” Instead of the station telling the hosts to stop talking about “putting a bullseye” on Nancy Pelosi, they attacked me and had my website shut down. It was a great narrative flip where they couldn’t play the victim.
When advertisers started leaving the station, one caller suggested to a host he should “name and shame” advertisers who left, to punish them. One of the three host’s agreed with that idea!
(The same suggestion was made to Musk, look at his bone head response!)
This is stupid behavior based on impulsive emotion. Lashing out at others, instead of looking at and fixing their own behavior, is typical narcissist behavior. THEY can never be the problem. “No one can tell ME what to say on my own show!” one RW host said.
Musk’s is seeing now what his definition of ‘free speech’ includes and doesn’t include. Mocking him isn’t included. Nor is impersonating brands.
Musk is learning TOS exist for a reason. “Hey, falsely impersonating others is bad! It happened to me! Spreading disinformation is bad, it led to harm to me, my bottom line!”
We know harmful content connected with terrorism, racism, misogyny and online hate is very real. I was telling someone I recently met about my work to defund right wing media because management wouldn’t take action to stop it. I told her that the movie Hotel Rwanda had a major impact on me and when I heard violent rhetoric coming out of my local radio station I decided to act. I knew that in America people change their behavior when money is involved. I set about showing the radio stations, and then TV stations, that what they thought was an asset, was actual a liability.
In America the impact of financial harm on a company is one of the ways we can drive change. It’s good to show everyone that Musk’s failure to follow Twitter’s own TOS is causing him financial harm.
But what if threatening violence is profitable? What if, like Murdoch’s Tucker Carlson show, threatening violence doesn’t earn the network money directly, but it does earn them power?
Twitter’s TOS has restrictions on threats of violence. I’ll bet that if Elon gets threats of violence toward him he’ll remove them. If they are removed, it needs to be pointed out that threats toward others should be removed too. I would say,
“Hey, Elon, you didn’t like it when you got threats of violence. You removed them. Other people should have the the same protections. Also, this is what the people you fired in the Trust Safety division did for the platform.”
POLICY & PEOPLE make a difference. AI programs alone aren’t going to cut it.
My friends in the activist community know that “Brand Safety” matters to companies and they have the financial incentive to protect their brands. They organized and taking these actions for a reason, they know some of the same things that upset Brands, like disinformation about medicine, can also hurt people. As individuals it often feels that you have no power to make a change, so I suggest you join up with these groups that are doing great, effective activism.
- Sign up for their email alerts
- Donate money to them
- Support their efforts to make social media a safer place
Here are four of my favorites and what they have said.
Free Press Action Fund
Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press. “Racists and conspiracy theorists are testing how far they can go with spreading lies, harassment and abuse — and misinformation about the midterm election is rampant. This is not the healthy forum that the vast majority of Twitter users want, and it exposes Twitter’s advertising partners to great risk. We’re calling on Twitter to, at a minimum, retain and actually enforce existing community safeguards and content-moderation systems.
Media Matters For America
Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America. “Musk has already put Twitter on that glide path, firing employees responsible for content moderation and brand protection and even tweeting out political conspiracy theories himself. Luckily, major brands that advertise on Twitter, and provide over 90 percent of its revenue each year, can speak up and make it clear: Their buys are contingent on the maintenance of the key brand-safety guidelines and community standards — and they will accept nothing less.”
Color of Change: Tell Advertisers: Keep Twitter Safe
Here is a copy of the open letter they sent to the top Twitter advertisers.
My new favorite group is The Center for Countering Digital Hate
“Elon Musk has consistently failed to comprehend that freedom of speech does not mean freedom to abuse and that online spaces should be safe for women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. ”Twitter must make a clear commitment to retaining existing standards, and Musk should provide a credible plan for applying his undeniable engineering prowess to reducing the prevalence of bots, increasing the detection and pre-publication removal of violative content, and enforcing the rules that prevent his platform from becoming a ‘hellscape’ with what appears to be significantly reduced staff and resources.”
I suggest people read their STAR Framework, a Global Standard for Regulating Social Media.
Safety by Design, Transparency, Accountability and Responsibility.
Here’s a quote from it,
We cannot continue on the current trajectory with bad actors creating a muddy and dangerous information ecosystem and a broken business model from Big Tech that drives offline harm. We need to reset our relationship with technology companies and collectively legislate to address the systems that amplify hate and dangerous misinformation around the globe.