X CEO Pledges to Censor 'Toxic Speech' to Appease Corporate Advertisers
Elon Musk’s alleged fidelity to free speech appears not to be going as promised. Musk promised to return free speech to the internet following his takeover of Twitter (now X, following a silly rebrand by a man-child with a well-documented, long-running obsession with the third-to-last letter of the English alphabet).
Back in March, I reported that Musk had installed a World Economic Forum acolyte, Linda Yaccarino, as CEO. From Yaccarino’s LinkedIn profile:
And now she’s running the company like anyone would expect a World Economic Forum goon to.
Via Associated Press (emphasis added):
The new CEO of the company formerly known as Twitter says she’s spent much of the past eight weeks trying to get big brands back and advertising on the social media platform that’s been in upheaval since it was bought last year by Elon Musk.
X Corp. CEO Linda Yaccarino said Thursday on CNBC that she has been focused on talking with brands like Coca Cola, Visa and State Farm, along with their chief marketing officers and chief executives.
Along with courting multinational corporations to return to X, of course, comes pressure to censor speech disfavored by the multinational corporate technocracy, as spearheaded by the World Economic Forum. That means the suppression of speech exercised by conservatives, libertarians, “domestic terrorists,” “right-wing extremists,” and whatever other label the corporate state has invented to smear anyone not on board with the Brave New World.
Related: Not-So-Free Speech: Biden DOJ Served Secretive Search Warrant on Trump’s Twitter Account
Continuing:
A number of companies had pulled back on ad spending — the platform’s chief source of revenue — over concerns that Musk’s thinning of content restrictions was enabling hateful and toxic speech to flourish…
She also said she’s been working to assure advertisers that brand safety initiatives tailored to them will make sure that their ads will “only air next to” content that’s appropriate to them.
She said the platform is balancing Musk’s free-speech vision with techniques that, while not removing many toxic posts, are supposed to make it hard for them to surface to most users.
“If it is lawful, but it’s awful, it’s extraordinarily difficult to see it,” Yaccarino said.
What’s the difference, pray tell, between outright banning “toxic posts” (an amorphous term, the interpretation of which is left to the whims of mostly woke engineers to determine) and “making them extraordinarily difficult to see” by not allowing anyone on the platform to see them in their feeds? It achieves the same effect. But Yaccarino knows that explicitly endorsing censorship as the official policy of X would run counter to everything its proprietor initially promised it would.
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