Twitter _is_ a toxic place with or without him.
He had thousands of replies to that tweet with people posting pictures of Musk looking even worse. Sure he posts low quality garbage on Twitter but so does everyone else. The entire point of the site is to post low quality 140 character zingers every waking second of the day.
You're missing the cause-and-effect here. People are stooping to his level. He's serving as a prime example of the worst kind of behavior to emulate, and emulate they are.
I disagree. Musk is stooping to the level of Twitter. Musk's shitposts generate way more activity than any of his SpaceX or Tesla posts.
Show me advertisers who are happy to monetize on this exact content then.
You also have advertisers willing to target the outrage crowd, so they would also stand to gain from the post.
Not all advertisers care about the things that advertisers from companies like Disney or the NFL care about.
From there it has spread to numerous other brands like Moon Pies, Sunny Delight, etc. Many snack and food brands were highly visible early adopters of this iteration of internet culture as a way to rep their brands.
So I ask again, show me examples of advertisers that enthusiastically advertise on shitposts.
Your own chosen example was Elon Musk recent twitter history. Debating the difference between your chosen example and Dennys to identify an obvious principle that distinguishes them is asking people to play calvinball with you.
... and I say this as someone who agrees with the argument that twitter is deeply toxic, that it systematically rewards, promotes, and monetizes toxicity, and that in this case Elon was behaving in a manner which within the abhorrent norms of the overall platform. [Though, I'm sure Mr. Gates will be fine, and that ultimately the comment mostly just makes Mr. Musk look bad...]
But having a different opinion on that doesn't make someone a killjoy. Someone isn't humorless because they think that mocking someone's appearance like that-- particularly outside of special context like a comedy club-- is gross.
Humor is very hard to monetize.
Elementary grade humor is still more funny than advertiser friendly, because the latter means safe. And safe hot takes don't really work.
I use Twitter to be redirected to other sites or topics, but not recently anymore because they banned anonymous users.
And it is still far better than some corporate consultants shilling for new rules for speech.
You’re saying it’s ok for an “algorithm” to slap the comedian off the stage but not Will Smith?
Your definition of “toxic” should be made explicit. I imagine you believe “offensive == toxic” which is naïve.
Not an easy problem, but if you’re a public figure then the rules surrounding satire / humor are different.
Elon Musk is absolutely not the right person for this job though. Indeed, he's one of the main forces hell-bent on making Twitter a toxic place. Look at this tweet for example (I'm not cherry-picking something from way back in the past; this is the third most recent thing he's tweeted):
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517707521343082496
The quality of that post is significantly below the quality of anything that routinely makes it to my own personalized feed. And in case you don't understand the context of that post, it's because Bill Gates may have shorted Tesla or something. So in retaliation for that, Elon is making fun of Bill Gates's appearance on the largest platform he has, and countless of his followers will take up this mantle and run with it.
It's actually hard for me to think of a worse person to come along and try to improve the quality of Twitter, except for maybe Trump.