Boycotting != blackmailing. It's perfectly within an advertiser's rights, even if you or I disagree. Vote with your wallet, as they say.

One thing to note is that not only is it within an advertiser's rights, it's probably also the better business decision.

If you can do a marketing campaign on say FaceBook where your ads will be targeted to your narrow market or a campaign on Twitter where your ads will be haphazardly place; which would you do?

It's Elons own fault. If he wanted Twitter to be able to compete with its competitors he probably shouldn't've fired the engineering team.

> blackmailing to dictate speech

Deciding not to buy from you isn't blackmail. Words have meanings. Blackmail has a definition.

Well GARM wasn’t sure that was true, so they immediately disbanded and that was praised as a first amendment win by the highest office holders in the us government.

> Well GARM wasn’t sure that was true

This is a lie.

> praised as a first amendment win by the highest office holders in the us government

Well, at one point the highest office holder in the US government looked directly at the sun during a solar eclipse, so this praise really doesn't say very much about whether it was a good or bad thing.

It’s tautologically the case that they wouldn’t have disbanded if they had 100% assurance this type of cartel was legal.

> It’s tautologically the case that they wouldn’t have disbanded if they had 100% assurance this type of cartel was legal

Also a lie. You should read up on SLAPP lawsuits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

Musk is pretty famous for bringing forum-shopped SLAPP lawsuits against his critics, because he has enough money to ruin other people with legal fees. They do generally get thrown out, but the legal system is not an efficient truth and justice machine like you pretend, and there's no federal anti-SLAPP law in the US, only state laws that don't apply in Texas when suing in a federal court.

But circling back, please tell me that you recognize a difference between the words "boycott" and "blackmail".

Did that get Elon his advertising back?

"Everyone who doesn't want to do business with me is blackmailing me! Also they're very mean!"

they didn't demand that he say or did not say certain things. they informed him that they didn't want their brands advertised next to the sort of things that their customers would frown upon.

you'd think that in becoming a billionaire, he'd have picked up a few rules of business.

And the ability to do this is bad, but it's also just normal capitalism which Elon supports. I'm okay with capitalism shifting capitalism supporters.

It's also a choice that Twitter made long ago to be funded primarily by advertisers. You'd think the guy that blew billions on the site might have noticed that during the due diligence he most certainly did

Except it shifts the ones with power towards authoritarianism, not reflection.

I mean, it's just freedom of association. There are only very limited circumstances where a company can be forced to advertise somewhere (only example I can think of is tobacco and alcohol companies required to pay for anti-smoking/drinking/etc PSAs as part of legal settlements).

Which is fine when it's about people listening to you, but bad when livelihoods depend on it. We can do better.

livelihoods? didn't he fire most of the employees at Twitter? what about their livelihoods?

> you'd think that in becoming a billionaire, he'd have picked up a few rules of business.

Are you telling me that in your opinion Musk doesn't have elementary knowledge about business?

he signed a deal to buy twitter and didn't realise he'd have to buy it.

he told his advertisers to go f*ck themselves then sued then for not using his personal blog to advertise.

it seems that the businesses he has the least involvement in tend to do better, but what do I know, I'm just a poor rando.

Well, either that, or he's doing a very good job of cosplaying as such a person.