After I posted X is bad, though, I got a metric ton of feedback. That’s a scientific measurement.
John Gruber, for his part, has pushed back to some on Mastodon with a fair question: If I’m judging platforms by their owners, the Ellisons aren’t much better than Musk. So should I stop watching Warner Bros. and Paramount movies? HBO? CBS? CNN?
Fair question.
First, I agree with John: The Ellisons are not the good guys. Larry is a major Trump backer. Paramount paid $16 million to settle a Trump lawsuit over a 60 Minutes edit that First Amendment lawyers considered laughable. A few days after Stephen Colbert called that settlement a “big fat bribe” on air, CBS canceled his show. And now the Warner Bros. deal is backed by sovereign wealth vehicles from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, which will put CBS News and CNN under the same family’s roof. If you worry about billionaires bending the news toward whoever’s in power, that’s plenty to worry about. I do.
But saying the Ellisons “aren’t much better” misses the point.
Go back to my list from my previous piece on this topic, which I look forward to talking about less starting soon. Every single receipt was something Musk personally said or did. He co-signed the Great Replacement. He made Nazi puns. He told a London crowd to fight back or die. He posted a slogan from The Turner Diaries. His words, from his account, on his platform.
The case against the Ellisons is that they’re craven. They kiss the ring to get their mergers approved. That’s bad! But it’s a different kind of bad. One is a cynical businessman protecting a deal. The other is a true believer with a megaphone. I don’t love either of them running a newsroom. But only one of them is the content.
Musk personally uses X as a vehicle for political messaging and amplifying hateful rhetoric. Watching HBO doesn’t inherently involve participating in Larry Ellison’s personal political communications.
Which brings me to what you’re actually feeding when you go back to X because it’s where the “fun” is. X’s product is attention. When you post there, you’re not the customer; you’re the inventory. Every interesting person who shows up makes the platform more valuable, and that’s the same platform Musk uses to boost the AfD and Tommy Robinson.
When I watch an HBO show, I’m paying for something made by hundreds of writers, actors, and crew, many of whom collect residuals. The Ellisons get a cut, sure. But I’m not lending my voice to make Larry’s timeline louder.
Elon actively uses X to bolster extremely aggressively right-wing propaganda. “Heated Rivalry” isn’t that.
Then there’s the bigger argument behind John’s question: You can’t avoid every bad billionaire, so why bother avoiding this one? Take that seriously and it’s an argument for never doing anything at all. Every line I draw is imperfect. I’m writing this on a Mac, made by a company whose then-CEO handed Trump a gold-plated plaque in the Oval Office. Imperfect lines are still lines.
As my friend James Thomson wrote on Mastodon, “if any of your friends say that they’ve had a shitty time in a particular bar, and you go ‘nah, it’s fine actually, I’ve had no problems there’, rather than ‘sorry, I didn’t know, let’s go somewhere else’, then you are a bad friend.”
I avoid X and encourage others to do the same because anything that helps Elon Musk amplify his hatred of minorities like trans people, Blacks, Jews, and more is bad. It hurts me, my trans kid, my family, and my friends.
John — like me — is white, male, cis, straight, and rich.
I don’t know how many of those labels apply to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, but I know for sure that he’s Black. Bouie wrote on Bluesky:
I’m sure X is remarkably friendly if you aren’t the target of racial slurs and harassment campaigns.
Anyway, I wonder how many “n———” I’ll have to sift through if I start posting there again?
Enjoying HBO programming isn’t helping to spread hate speech. Musk uses X to do just that. And Musk plans to spend $100M promoting Trump acolytes in the November elections.
“The Ellisons are bad, too” is a great argument for paying attention to the Ellisons. It’s not an argument for X.
X is still bad, though.