I despair for my country
I despair for my country.
You should see the comments on this very event on Techspot. They are ugly.
People going on about gov't censorship (nothing here has been censored, advertisers pulled their funds.)
People coming out in support of Musk, saying everyone who supports pulling advertisements from hate speech are "woke".
Nonsense circular logic about how this speech is fine but saying "Maybe hate speech is not a good thing" (not a call for censorship, just the suggestion that maybe one should not actively support these views)... is unreasonable extremism.
The view that these companies (I mean, IBM! Really!) are "progressive-aligned". Even the suggestion that they wanted to drop ads on Twitter for a long time and just used this as a manufactured excuse to do so (which I find an odd argument, companies have shifted ad spend from one platform to another since the beginning of time.)
Nonsense about fake news and media distortions (of course, not sites like Fox News or NewsMax where they distort things enough they are hard to recognize compared to what really happened... complaints about more mainstream sites that posted a story, updated it within 24 hours as new info came in, as "proof" that they intentionally posted inaccurate information since the original article had to be updated.)
And of course, since the US has only 2 main political parties, the ugly polarizing bickering based on the view from many Deomcrats that almost all Republicans have extreme far right views, and conversely the view from many Republicans that almost all Democrats have extreme far left views. If we had a functional multi-party system, those people would be in their respective far-left and far-right parties, with the bulk being in center-left and center-right parties merrily getting along and actually agreeing on at least some issues.
I made what I thought was a reasonable suggestion, perhaps Twitter/X should allow for ad controls like has been going on for TV/radio for over 50 years (you can choose to not have your ads on certain shows) and other websites and platforms. I mean, I did an Android app with banner ads, I could select not to have gambling, alcohol/tobacco, and "adult" ads, and conversely the ad suppliers could choose to not display their ads on gambling apps, "adult" apps, etc. They would even likely get more ad revenue as better ad targetting would increase the view and clickthrough ("conversion") rates, letting them get more $$$ per ad. The commentors on there were too busy calling the others "woke" (and then acting like they didn't say "Woke" when someone would comment on their use of the term) to even respond to any actual discussions.