Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has reported a “massive drop” in revenues due to advertisers pulling out of the company amid pressure from left-leaning activist organizations.
Condemning the efforts to strip Twitter of ad revenue as an attack on free speech, Musk agreed with a political commentator who argued that attempts to appease the left were an exercise in futility.
“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” said Musk. “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”
Responding to Musk, political commentator Ian Miles Cheong said the Tesla and SpaceX CEO should give up on efforts to appease left-wing activists.
“It’s time to stop appeasing the activists because they will stop at nothing to hurt Twitter regardless of what you do,” said Cheong.
“You’re right,” responded Musk.
In subsequent tweets, Musk said Twitter’s commitment to content moderation was “absolutely unchanged.”
“In fact, we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press,” said Musk.
The new Twitter owner also praised the new head of content moderation, radical leftist Yoel Roth, who emphasized that “core moderation capabilities remain in place,” and that “80 percent of incoming content moderation volume” was unaffected by recent layoffs.
“With early voting underway in the US, our efforts on election integrity — including harmful misinformation that can suppress the vote and combatting state-backed information operations — remain a top priority,” said Roth.
The threat of state-backed misinformation, which even liberal researchers admit had a negligible impact on the 2016 elections, has been used by leftist activists — the same leftist activists pushing for Twitter advertiser boycotts — to justify the existence of Big Tech’s vast censorship apparatus.
There is no evidence that foreign interference has been a major factor in any recent U.S. election. On the other hand, the false threat of foreign interference was used by the FBI, which has transformed into a politically partisan arm of the anti-Trump deep state, to persuade tech platforms to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, which had a measurable impact on that election’s result.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
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