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It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology. I’ve been feeling the same way but didn’t and still don’t necessarily have enough evidence to really prove the claim. There are small bits here and there, like Shane Gillis hosting SNL again, camera men once again zooming in on attractive women in the crowd during the Euro 2024 matches, people being less afraid to say “retarded” which was approaching “faggot” levels of taboo, BLM withering into almost nothingness, Supreme Court affirmative action decision, etc.
Firstly, do you agree with the claim?
And more importantly, how much of this is driven by Elon’s takeover of twitter? Twitter in retrospect was clearly the cancellation platform par excellence, it doesn’t seem like TikTok or Instagram hold the same “weight” as image and video platforms. There was something about Twitter which had both a radical cancellation faction but still retained gravitas as a place for news and other serious topics to be discussed or announced. This meant that both boomer PMC types and terminally online radicals could congregate and the latter could influence the former. And by virtue of the fact that it was on twitter, it was more “believable” an had more gravitas. And maybe even the text-based nature of the platform prevented us from assessing the accuser in the physical realm. TikTok and IG still have commissars ready to cancel, but no gravitas and you can see who is attempting to be the canceller, they will often look crazy and we can sense their mental illness through their appearance (people like to say women have “crazy” eyes, I think this is probably a reasonable evolutionary heuristic) or how they are talking, gesturing, etc.
Was this the most well-placed takedown in history? Elon clearly did this as a way to knock woke ideology down a peg, even if it wasn’t his primary aim it sure looks to be the most successful aspect of that acquisition.
The waves roll in, the waves roll out, but the tide is still coming in. They have to be a bit more quiet about transing the kids after it turned out to be a bridge too far... but they're still doing it, they're just not talking about it as much. It's harder to cancel people because most have learned what not to say; this is not pushback but abject obedience. The war between the Zionist and pro-Hamas factions in progressivism is also taking up a lot of their energy at the moment. And yes, Twitter/X is a bright spot in that dissent is allowed there for now, at least until the ad boycott finally breaks them.
Why would the ad boycott break them? If it's profitable to advertise on Twitter, companies will do it. Maybe not Disney, but others will.
I suppose there is a case to be made that most or all advertising is wasted money, in which case companies will choose to waste it somewhere besides Twitter.
But given that costs are down by something like 75%, it's tough to believe that an ad boycott will hurt them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they are quite profitable already.
It's not so much the principals as the ad agencies. The top end of the advertising industry is gated through a small number of firms, and if those firms (due to ideological capture) "advise" their clients that it's poison to advertise on Twitter, they won't. And since they can, in fact, punish defectors through the press and NGOs to announce boycotts, they can even make it poison for any of the larger companies to advertise on Twitter.
Can you point to any sort of stats on the subject?
Advertising is probably more vulnerable to this particular ideology than something like the oil or fast food industries. That’s not saying much. Surely they want to make money, too?
More generally, I think it’s kind of lame to retreat to the conspiracy-theory motte. Yeah, if you draw a small enough circle, you can find someone to serve as your obscure cabal. But that excludes more and more of the money and power.
It's too late to claim the ad boycott is just a conspiracy theory.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/06/1217513348/advertising-boycott-at-the-platform-formerly-known-as-twitter-grows-by-the-day
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-elon-musk-donald-trump-naacp-adl-ad-boycott/
https://www.engadget.com/twitter-losing-advertisers-boycott-193748977.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67460386
I’m not claiming it’s a conspiracy theory. I’m saying scale is overstated when talking about effects, but downplayed when speaking of perpetrators. Same way a hypothetical New World Order turns into grumbling about the WEF.
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