Earlier this week, X Formerly Twitter sued former advertisers who left the platform over concerns that it was allowing their content to appear next to hate speech. Sure, suing advertisers for choosing not to buy ads on your decaying platform, that’s just classic free speech absolutism.
As part of this overflowing dumpster of stupidity, CEO Linda Yaccarino posted a video attempting to spin the company’s lawsuit as being filed on behalf of users. It was not well-received.
It was also not intellectually honest. It included these lines:
“That puts your global town square, the one place that you can express yourself freely and openly, at long-term risk. People are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is constricted. No small group of people should be able to monopolize what gets monetized.”
Rather than supporting their lawsuit, that sounds like an argument against the very existence of X as a private entity. If a global town square is so important, it certainly shouldn’t be owned by an unaccountable private company who can control it without oversight, nor should it rely on advertising dollars for its existence. Perhaps Musk and Yaccarino are secretly hoping for a government bailout and takeover, so they can move past the mess they’ve made.
Fortunately, however, that’s not needed. We already had a global town square long before Twitter, and it’s called the web. The web remains free and open. The web is the true place you can express yourself freely and openly. And the web, not X, is the platform worth protecting.
Footnotes:
As always, the (hostage) video is archived here. ↩︎
