Elon Musk, Who Now Claims Boycotts Are Illegal, Happily Joined The #DeleteFacebook Boycott Himself
Elon Musk’s recent claims that corporate boycotts of social media platforms are criminal reek of hypocrisy, given his own eagerness to join the #DeleteFacebook boycott just a few years ago.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk publicly supported the #DeleteFacebook campaign, even going so far as to remove the official SpaceX and Tesla pages from the platform. Yet now, as the owner of ExTwitter, he’s singing a very different tune — suing advertisers who choose to boycott his platform over content moderation concerns.
The blatant double standard is notable, if not surprising. Musk was happy to wield the power of the boycott when it suited his interests and let him mock his rival, Mark Zuckerberg. But now he condemns the tactic as criminal when turned against him. This “rules for thee, but not for me” attitude deserves to be called out even if he and his supporters will happily ignore the rank hypocrisy.
Earlier this year, Elon sued GARM — the “Global Alliance for Responsible Media” — a tiny non-profit that sought to advise brands on how to advertise safely on social media in a manner that (1) wouldn’t tarnish their own brands, and (2) was generally better for the world. GARM had no power and didn’t demand or order any company to do anything. It just worked with advertisers to try to establish some basic standards and to advocate that social media companies try to live up to those basic standards in how they handled moderation.
As we noted, just weeks before Elon sued GARM, ExTwitter had “excitedly” rejoined GARM, knowing that many advertisers trusted its opinion on determining where they should focus their ad spend.
But it seems clear that Elon felt differently. After a very misleading report was put out by Jim Jordan, Elon declared war on GARM and sued a bunch of advertisers. In response, GARM was shut down.
Musk and his friends are now going around saying that participating in an organized boycott of social media is criminal. Right around the time he sued, Musk suggested such a boycott might just be “RICO”:
And, as we just discussed, here’s Musk-backer and friend, Marc Andreessen, claiming that such boycotts are criminal.
However, my cohost on Ctrl-Alt-Speech called out in last episode that Elon Musk himself was quite happy to support a similar boycott not all that long ago.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook data was used to try to influence voters to vote for Donald Trump (yes, this is ironic, given what Elon did with ExTwitter), some activists kicked off a boycott campaign called #DeleteFacebook.
Elon Musk showed some interest in the campaign by joking to someone “What’s Facebook?” in response to a (now deleted) tweet about the campaign. Some users then challenged him to join the #DeleteFacebook campaign by removing the SpaceX and Tesla accounts from Facebook, which he did.
As far as I can tell, to this day, there are no official, verified Tesla or SpaceX pages on Facebook.
Years later, after he had taken over Twitter, Elon even mocked Facebook for “caving” to the very boycott that he participated in himself.
Musk’s brazen hypocrisy on boycotts is just the latest example of his free speech double standard. He delights in wielding his immense power and influence to mock, criticize and yes, boycott those he disagrees with. But the moment anyone turns those same tactics against him, he cries foul and literally makes a federal case out of it.
This kind of self-serving double standard is corrosive to public discourse and the principles of free speech that Musk claims to hold so dear. While he and his supporters will almost certainly choose to ignore the stench of hypocrisy, the rest of us shouldn’t. Musk’s boycott hypocrisy deserves to be dragged out into the light again and again for everyone else to recognize.