Whither Goes Elon?
The jury is out on his Twitter reboot. Whether he can make it a profitable business, or if it exists solely to feed his ego, remains the question.
Sales on Twitter have plummeted as advertisers have abandoned ship, so new owner and media newbie, Elon Musk, has offered a matching program—you buy $500,000 in ads, and he’ll match you, effectively halving the cost to appear there.
Any ad sales rep will tell you that cutting prices only devalues your product, signaling that Twitter isn’t worth what it used to command, and it will probably never be able to command those high dollars again.
Exposure to a billboard at highway speeds is only seven seconds, but at least you know how many cars will pass it. How many people stop scrolling for seven seconds to look at every ad?
You don’t consciously recognize them all, but according to Forbes, most Americans are exposed to as many as 10,000 advertisements a day. That’s everything from the Crest logo on your toothpaste, to highly produced ads on TV, and everything in between, including all the banner ads on your laptop and telephone that you totally ignore.
It's clear that no major advertiser wants to appear next to White racist/Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, the charming dinner companion to an ex-president. He hates immigrants, and all things LGBT related, wants to deport all Jews, and militarize black neighborhoods. One wonders how he feels about Mexicans named “Fuentes.”
And yes, Fuentes and his friends like Trump, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert, are all back on the platform, all in the name of free speech. This crowd assaults that right by constantly yelling “fire” in the crowded theatre of the public square.
Maybe the ex-president wants to have dinner with this ilk, but I certainly don’t. And I can’t imagine eating at the same table with them. Have you seen their manners?
How about the hateful Charlie Kirk? You may recall him as our horrible person of the month year century—he’s the guy that suggested the hammer attack that put 80 year old Paul Pelosi in the hospital was the result of a gay orgy, and pleaded for some “amazing patriot” to bail the basher out of jail. When not doing his pathetic performance art thing, Kirk is the founding president of Turning Point USA, the group dedicated to radicalizing high school and college students with a full slate of prejudice and bigotry. Just the stuff you want your kids coming home with, let alone confronting you on Twitter every time you sign on. I call this performance art because as galactically idiotic as he is, Kirk knows the perp isn’t eligible for parole, or presumably, he’d have bailed the guy out himself.
So welcome to the Mad Max version of Twitter, where anything goes, except ad dollars and common sense, which, as Mark Twain observed, “Is not nearly so common.”
Now the Associated Press is reporting that Twitter has ended its embargo on COVID-19 mis- and disinformation. This feels like “fire” in a crowded theater on steroids. It’s all of a piece with Elon’s free speech offensive.
Sooner or later, if you make a platform a haven for hateful misinformation, or purposefully hateful disinformation, it becomes a sanctuary for those who threaten society. Not only will there be no advertisers willing to put their products next to such garbage, there won’t be anyone left besides their acolytes to read it.
We’ve been here before. Nothing under the sun is new when it comes to hate, demagoguery, and usefully malicious ignorance. The last time was in the 60’s when the John Birchers preached all this same nonsense, with the cherry of “Get us out of the UN” on top. The difference that time—and the many times before going back to the founding of our country—is that this time they have willing media platforms. In the 1960s, no TV network was willing to give the Birchers much oxygen, and in the 1760s, their pamphlets just didn’t have the kind of reach that Twitter has.
But in the 1930s, for a brief couple of years, radio stations broadcasted the hateful antisemite, Father Charles Coughlin, his “Christian Front,” and his support for the original “America First” (again, nothing new under the sun) that tried to keep us out of WWII, and promoted Nazi ideals like killing all the Jews. That was a troubling time, and it took years before stations in New York and Chicago cancelled the biggest radio show in America, ending its run.
Coughlin would feel right at home on Elon’s Twitter, with his clever messaging that FDR was actually “Franklin Delano Rosenfelt,” a secret Jew out to destroy the USA.
If you’re a Twitter user, get ready for the onslaught of prostate-shrinkers, magic hair growers, and get rich quick schemes, because soon, they’ll be the only advertisers left. There aren’t enough My Pillow Guys in the world to make this a sustainable advertiser-supported platform again.
©2022 Jon Sinton