November 28, 2022

The Left’s Two-Front War on Twitter

Twitter’s Elon Musk is committed to free speech, and the Left is equally committed to stopping him.

There’s a two-front war being waged against Twitter, and it confirms everything we’ve long suspected about the Left and its hostility toward free speech.

One battlefront revolves around advertising, the revenue from which is the life’s blood of a social media platform. The other front involves Twitter’s users, who the Left hopes to chase away to an alternative platform by making Twitter seem socially unacceptable.

Earlier this month, we got a sense of how that advertising war is being waged, and by whom. As NBC News reported: “A group comprised of 60 civil rights and civil society groups, including the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League, launched the website, StopToxicTwitter.com, urging major brands to halt advertising on Twitter.”

It didn’t take long.

The Washington Post, NPR, Media Matters, and other reliably left-wing organs are now gleefully reporting on the exodus of major advertisers from Twitter. According to the Post: “More than a third of Twitter’s top 100 marketers have not advertised on the social media network in the past two weeks, a Washington Post analysis of marketing data found — an indication of the extent of skittishness among advertisers about billionaire Elon Musk’s control of the company.”

Media Matters was even more enthusiastic about this advertising attrition: “Fifty of the top 100 advertisers have either announced or seemingly stopped advertising on Twitter,” they report. “These advertisers have accounted for nearly $2 billion in spending on the platform since 2020, and over $750 million in advertising in 2022 alone.”

The Soros-funded, Fox-News-deranged Media Matters goes on to list the advertisers that have either publicly announced that they’ve stopped advertising on Twitter or are “quiet quitters.” Those publicly quitting include Chevrolet, Chipotle, Ford, Jeep, Kyndryl, Merck, and Novartis. The quiet quitters include Abbott Labs, Allstate, American Express, AT&T, BlackRock, Citigroup, CNN, Fidelity, and plenty more.

All this is based on data from a company called Pathmatics, which, we’re told, “offers brand analysis on digital marketing trends.”

How serious is the threat to Twitter’s advertising pipeline? Very serious. “If it becomes an essential street fight around hate speech, advertisers are going to run for the hills,” said Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives. “That fundamentally is the problem. You’re trying to bring advertisers back on while loosening content moderation. Those go exactly against each other. And no advertiser is going to jump in the deep end until they know the rules of the game. And Musk goes to the beat of a different drummer.”

Thus, with corporate advertisers being naturally averse to controversy, and with an activist group of “civil rights” organizations chirping in their ears, it’s not hard to see how this works — and how it’ll hurt Twitter’s bottom line regardless of wherever else it might be cutting costs and streamlining its operations.

Then there’s the alternative platform push — in this case to a micro-blogging site called Mastodon. Fox News reports: “As Twitter users chatter about the platform’s potential impending demise amid mass layoffs and resignations and reports that the app for employees had begun to slow, some users have turned to Mastodon as a potential alternative.”

Mastodon, which fancies itself as “radically different social media, back in the hands of the people,” was founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko. Remarkably, he’s the project’s only full-time employee, and the decentralized, open-source social network is a nonprofit.

At this point, Mastodon doesn’t pose a numerical threat to Twitter. The platform currently has more than a million users, nearly half of whom Rochko said signed up after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October. Twitter, by comparison, reported 238 million daily active users at the end of the second quarter of 2022.

But while Twitter is still the dominant force in the micro-blogging space, those who appreciate free speech shouldn’t underestimate the Left’s hatred of it, nor the lengths to which it will go to control the marketplace of ideas.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.