Law.
Specifically anti-trust law that prohibits (coordinated) corporate boycotts.
A reminder of what Musk publicly said to these advertisers when they didn’t want ads for their products displayed next to racist/antisemitic/white supremacist rhetoric:
Surely this will come up in this suit.
Yeah I’m guessing Elon has little chance of winning this suit unless he gets an extremely friendly MAGA judge ruling on it, it’s likely to be dismissed before it ever reaches trial.
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If there is proof that communication existed between member companies regarding a boycott that would be a smoking gun. x is probably reaching, arguing that the proof must exist as opposed to “we have copies of emails/recordings of meeting where a boycott is discussed”
For most of us it is more likely that X was offensive enough that no one needed to collude. Heck some of us here stopped using X back then. This shouldn’t be too hard to sort out right?
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The, “C’mon” Defense doesn’t work as well as it used to, due to lack of common sense.
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This is how low we have sank :sigh:.
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This is Elon fishing for a reason to blame someone else for his shitty behavior, and nothing more.
Or, put another way: if the government is going to investigate antitrust violations, there are a lot more targets that would be more impactful for the American public as a whole than a guy whose ego caused him to grossly overpay for a social media platform that he down spends at least 20/7 shit posting on and attacking anyone who disagrees with him while flying a “free speech for all” banner.
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Not a govt initiated investigation, private lawsuit. It is definitely an ironic hissy fit, but I’d not want to be on the association legal team sweating whether my antitrust training was taken seriously by my employees.
An email telling advertisers “you probably don’t want to advertise on X because your corporate logo will likely appear next to nazi posts” doesn’t strike me as proposing a boycott.
A boycott is intended to punish a company for behaving in ways you don’t like. that’s not the same as identifying a company with a faulty product.
it’s like saying an email to car companies recommending they not buy firestone tires because they blow up is organizing a boycott. No. it’s not punishing the company because their tires blow up. its advice not to buy their product because its bad.
similarly, X’s product of eye space is a bad product because of the nazi posts. this isn’t a boycott.
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As I understand it, It is not just a question of the content of the email, but who sends it to whom.
As a private individual I can send an email to companies saying I will refuse to buy from you since you do such and such and won’t until you stop. I can tell my friends and neighbors don’t do business with company a because such and such. But if I were CEO of a business and told other CEOs i knew, that starts to be risky.
If I were a trade org employee, and organized a meeting of companies saying “company a does something consumers are likely to find disturbing enough that seeing you associated with them will negatively impact your sales” is borderline. Adding “for the good of the industry we should stop doing business with a” is a violation of the law. Nothing in the law prohibits companies from coming to their own conclusions about with whom to do business, it just prohibits doing it together.
I wonder the term “boycott”'s general use is confusing people. Kinda like discrimination.
Talk to your legal department. See what they say.
I’m obviously not digging out the lawsuit to read the papers, but I’m just curious what kind of proof Musk has for this vs. how much of it is “I want to threaten to drag everyone into a courtroom and scare them into advertising with me again no matter what kind of a shitbag I am.”
Again, if companies are colluding on something like this they’re probably colluding on bigger stuff too, which then starts to go down the tinfoil path. At some point, Occam’s Razor is more suitable.
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Not only do i not expect that proof to surface, I think it’s extremely unlikely those conversations happened.
There were newspaper articles about how companies were dropping ads on Twitter due to not wanting their ad to show up next to Nazi posts, sure. But that’s not illegal collusion in the part of the advertisers. And with that kind on chatter (even on Twitter, which i think it was still called) who needs to collude? In fact, why help your competitors by suggesting it to them? What’s to gain by illegally colluding? It didn’t help any of those advertisers to lose a previously-useful platform.
(In fact, I was talking to a guy who runs a very small company a couple of weeks ago. He’s starting a Patreon, in part because he’s looking for a way to reach customers now that “the Internet sucks”. He used to post on Twitter, but his customers no longer read X. He’s very frustrated by the lack of options.)
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It is probably saved on the Hunter Biden laptop.
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If they have this proof, it seems like a slam-dunk win.
If they don’t, it seems like Elon is a whiny vexatious litigant.
He is a whiny vexatious ligitant, but perhaps they have some evidence on this one. I doubt it.
It doesn’t require collusion for multiple companies to say “Hey, the guy who’s running our ads next to Nazi propaganda and tells us to go fuck ourselves, maybe we should stop paying him?”
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Trump may be back but some others are leaving.
Should never have been on it in the first place. There are other, more official, methods of disseminating information than fucking Twitter (now X). No, it is not necessary.
Antisocial Media (IMO). No, not with a hyphen. That would mean something completely different, all together.
Damnit I thought I coined something. Too good not to have been stolen by a time traveler.
And a whole damn book about it:
Not to defend anything that Musk has done with X, but it has always been an efficient platform for disseminating information. But like everything else on the internet, it has turned into a cesspool with the guardrails removed. The providers of good content are being overrun by hateful people and are simply walking away. The posting of crap anonymously was always the worst feature of X, but now there are no real mechanisms in place to prevent it from becoming the main feature.
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I had a feeling this was going to come back and bite him (Musk)
£470,000 (€550,000) for unfair dismissal