Subject: Re: Glenn Greenwald on the Elon interview
So Twitter was free of randos saying reprehensible things before Elon bought it?

No. But Jack Dorsey wasn't on there re-tweeting antisemitic randos.

Plus, the fact that Twitter was at least trying to remove toxic content gave companies - and more importantly the executives within those companies that decide advertising spends - a fig leaf to stay on the site.

First off, MediaMatters rigged those posts with the specific intent of driving advertisers off. Those advertisers - woke outfits like Disney and Apple - have been waiting for an excuse to virtue signal their way off the platform and thus they ran with it.

Why would they wait more than a year to do that? They don't need anyone's permission - or an excuse - to pull or reduce their ad spend on a site. If they were waiting for an excuse to virtue signal their way off the site, they could have done so in October 2022 when a bunch of other companies left after Musk started slashing the content safety teams.

This current pullback of advertisers isn't due to Twitter's journalism - it's due to Twitter's antisemitic content. Musk's tweet was horrible (and he admitted how poor a choice it was in the interview). And it's not just the fact of that post. By retweeting it, he shows that his own personal consumption on the site exposes him to that kind of stuff and he doesn't know/understand/care how horrible it is. Which undermines his whole "speech not reach" sales pitch that it's possible to have toxic hateful stuff on the site but not have it spread very far - because he's an unbelievably visible counterexample.

I understand why Twitter - and allies like Greenwald - want to reframe this as being about journalism and not toxic content. But it's not journalism, not political speech, that launched this firestorm. It's just randos posting their antisemitic screeds and dank Hitler memes. Musk has made a choice for his site that such toxic content (or "Hateful Conduct," as Twitter calls such stuff that violates their "Rulez") gets to stay on the site rather than pulled. That the people who post that stuff get to stay on the site, rather than getting banned. So when he retweets that toxic content, and it becomes front-page news again that Twitter is perfectly willing to let antisemitic posts and posters remain on the site, he loses advertisers.

There's nothing laudable about choosing to let people publish antisemitic stuff on Twitter. And wrapping that in the flag of "journalism" doesn't change that.