Writing in the New York Times, Yoel Roth, the former “head of trust and safety” (Orwell would be unsurprised that politically helpful euphemism remains a lively source of linguistic creativity) discusses some of the content issues that have arisen in Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover of the company.
Notwithstanding questions over Roth’s supposed bias, the article is thoughtful. And while there are things to disagree with, it is well worth reading. Among other topics, Roth raises interesting questions about the extent to which Musk can really build Twitter as a bastion of free speech given various constraints, including those coming from censorship hot spots where Twitter is still allowed, such as the EU and the UK.
That’ll be something to talk about on another occasion, but in the meantime, this caught my eye:
Advertisers have played the most direct role thus far in moderating Mr. Musk’s free speech ambitions. As long as 90 percent of the company’s revenue comes from ads (as was the case when Mr. Musk bought the company), Twitter has little choice but to operate in a way that won’t imperil the revenue streams that keep the lights on. This has already proved to be challenging.
Almost immediately upon the acquisition’s close, a wave of racist and antisemitic trolling emerged on Twitter. Wary marketers, including those at General Mills, Audi and Pfizer, slowed down or paused ad spending on the platform, kicking off a crisis within the company to protect precious ad revenue.
The advertisers’ response is understandable enough. To have a commercial adjacent, say, to some antisemitic bile is not what they want to see.
Roth:
In response, Mr. Musk empowered my team to move more aggressively to remove hate speech across the platform — censoring more content, not less. Our actions worked: Before my departure, I shared data about Twitter’s enforcement of hateful conduct, showing that by some measures, Twitter was actually safer under Mr. Musk than it was before.
Marketers have not shied away from using the power of the purse: In the days following Mr. Musk’s acquisition, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a key ad industry trade group, published an open call to Twitter to adhere to existing commitments to “brand safety.” It’s perhaps for this reason that Mr. Musk has said he wants to move away from ads as Twitter’s primary revenue source: His ability to make decisions unilaterally about the site’s future is constrained by a marketing industry he neither controls nor has managed to win over.
All very straightforward, at least at first sight.
But what, I wondered, is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media? Given the slippery ways that, in this age of euphemism, the word “responsible” can be used, its appearance within the name of “global alliance” raised a red flag.
Click on GARM’s website:
GARM is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a cross-industry initiative established by the World Federation of Advertisers to address the challenge of harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising…
As of November 2019, GARM is a flagship project of the World Economic Forum Platform For Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture.
Ah, the World Economic Forum: Davos! Klaus Schwab!
Reaches for the tinfoil and clicks on a WEF website:
[GARM] will leverage the Forum’s existing network of industry, academic, civil society and public-sector partners to amplify its work on digital safety and to ensure that consumers and their data are protected online within a healthier media ecosystem.
“Healthier.”
Click again on a related WEF website:
The Alliance is leveraging the Forum’s existing network of industry, academic, civil society and public-sector partners to amplify its work on digital safety…
And down the corporatist rabbit hole I go:
WEF:
Together with members and partners on our Media, Entertainment and Sport platform, through initiatives like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, we are aggregating solutions to major industry disruptions while driving greater social cohesion and helping companies remain accountable to the global social good.
Companies should be accountable to the law and to their shareholders, but, as so often, WEF’s stakeholder capitalists throw in something else, accountability to a “global social good” defined by the unaccountable and, to most of us, unknown.
Follow through with another click here, this time to a page that explains the WEF’s “Platform for Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture.” (Nothing ominous about that!) There you will read that
media companies and organizations are uniquely positioned to leverage the scale and reach of their platforms for positive societal impact on key issues such as Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), equality, justice, sustainability and societal wellbeing.
Somehow, I just knew that those would be “key issues,” and that harnessing the media toward pursuit of a “positive societal impact” (as defined by yet more of the unaccountable and unknown) would be another objective.
Today’s corporatism is what it is.
All this seems like a long way from where this post began — the controversy over Musk’s running of Twitter — but it is a reminder that, in an age where corporatism is on the march, even something as routine as an unwillingness to alienate advertisers can involve issues that run far deeper than anything that Don Draper or, for that matter, anyone who cares about free speech or even democracy would have recognized as worthy of the slightest consideration.
Musk is charging into a minefield.