Among all the large social media platforms, only Twitter remains mostly free of intense political scrutiny and censorship. The rest are still doing today what they did during the COVID-19 pandemic: throttling, clocking, and banning content that contradicts regime priorities. And those priorities overlap with advertiser priorities, particularly of the pharmaceutical companies, who exercise enormous influence.
When Elon Musk considered resigning as CEO of Twitter, he posted a poll. The answer came back that he should resign. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he said. He then set out to find a new CEO. He didn’t post a poll. Instead, he hired Linda Yaccarino, previously head of advertising at NBCUniversal. She lobbied hard to be a CEO, and Twitter was the ticket.
It didn’t take long for people to ferret out a few things about her. She’s a highly placed member of the World Economic Forum (WEF). She’s a strong believer in DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance), and all the other corporate claptrap that’s currently preventing U.S. businesses from regaining their ability to serve consumers and stockholders. She believes in a form of content moderation that serves the advertising “stakeholders” rather than some abstraction such as free speech.
When she posted the announcement on her timeline, she was trolled hard by nearly the entire user community. Was she shocked? Probably. She’s a perfect embodiment of the bubble-dwelling “wokester” who looks down on the large community of “deplorable” users out there. She very likely isn’t prepared for what she must do or the earful that she’s going to get daily.
Musk knew all of this when he hired her. What’s up? Well, Twitter is facing an enormous debt right now from the sale. His first action was to reduce labor costs with an amazing four out of every five employees fired over a period of weeks. Impressively, the platform now works better than ever, which serves as a real sign to the rest of corporate America that it can get by just fine without much of its top layer.
Then he rushed to try to turn the famed “blue checkmark” into a paid service, promising more reach for your tweets if you pay a monthly fee. This was all rather haphazard and thrown together, and it didn’t really work. The freebie model is so entrenched in this and so many other platforms that merely flipping a switch simply couldn’t make up the difference. Then he started increasing the offerings, if only to get cash in the door and do something about the reported $4 million per day that the company was still losing.
The big problem he faced was an advertiser boycott. Reportedly, 37 of the top 100 advertisers on the platform pulled out once Twitter unblocked countless numbers of accounts. The result was truly wonderful for the user experience. My follower count soared, and so did my post reach. Many users report the same. It was like a brand-new experience, free of the heavy hand of government.
Corporate advertisers didn’t like it much. This is because, for the big corporations, this is no longer the 1980s. They have bought in completely to a lefty woke agenda as pushed by the largest financial companies and banks, who are now grading companies on scoring that goes way beyond profitability. Elon is on record as hating all this nonsense, but the economics of the situation represents a hard wall. He’s really stuck on this front, having to choose between a free-speech ideal and the very survival of the company. From his point of view, he tried a paid model and it didn’t go the whole mile. Now he has to get the advertisers back.
To my mind, all of this was intentional. There’s a reason why Twitter for six months has been the only highly networked platform that allowed posts that discuss things such as vaccine safety or otherwise permit criticisms of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, FBI, and so on. It’s because censorship of social media is a huge regime priority. All these advertisers working in league with the WEF, BlackRock, and so on decided to show Musk who and what’s boss. They did to Twitter what they want to do to us: starve us until we comply.
So, yes, the presence of this new CEO is a very bad sign for the future of Twitter as a free-speech platform. Tucker Carlson had decided to take his program to Twitter after he was fired by Fox, but this was before the new CEO showed up. Might he be rethinking this now? I have no inside knowledge, but I’m guessing so. He might instead be going to Rumble or maybe just create his own new network with every built-in feature to guard against external controls.
Where does that leave Twitter? The cliché is true: If you aren’t paying for the service, you are the service. The customers in the case of free social media are the advertisers. They call the shots. Many of them are themselves dependent on government, and that puts government in the driver’s seat, too. You’re using platforms that you don’t control. They can keep you as a content provider so long as you conform to what they want.
Musk had different ideas when he took over Twitter, but he didn’t know the space well enough to understand the huge difference between a paid service and a free one. Nor did he understand the mechanics and marketing of switching from one to another. Nor did he have the patience to figure it out.
The Epoch Times itself has a remarkable story to tell about once existing as a free service and then being forced to completely retool in light of bans and censorship on the social media platforms it used for revenue. After several all-night sessions, they took a risk on a loyal reader base and completely converted. It’s one of the greatest but least-known corporate success stories of our times. It has become a very serious and highly influential alternative.
It can work if you back that with valuable content. Twitter is a social network funded by advertisers. It was only a matter of time until the advertisers started to call the shots. When Musk recognized that, he bailed. Now users are suddenly at the mercy of BlackRock and the WEF again. The new CEO needs merely to cite financial need to prevail over every ideal.
Will it work? Maybe. But will it become what we and all actual users hoped? Doubtful. But, hey, it was good while it lasted.
This upheaval is occurring during an extremely difficult time for white-collar business enterprises that have soared to new heights in the past 20 years. Credit is now very expensive. Capital is chasing returns from companies with a more immediate return in the real world instead of the world of bloated information distributors. It’s true that Twitter has the advantage of having cut four-fifths of its workforce. But it apparently isn’t enough to make it a viable business.
In addition, Twitter faces a serious problem in that it has no way to target its ads because it has no technology for capturing or tracking the unique needs of its users, a task in which Facebook has come to specialize. Instead, ads just appear everywhere, which likely makes them far less lucrative. There’s little hope of changing that.
In the end, free speech depends fundamentally on alternative sources of news and other social platforms. The legacy services, among which we can include Twitter, are hopelessly compromised, more than we know, more than we can imagine. Most everyone underestimates the extent of deep-state infiltration of all mainstream sources. The goings-on at Twitter today underscore the point; they aren’t giving up this fight.
