It’s really not fine right now, is it?
Opinion
It may be too painful to accept that what Elon Musk is doing to our industry is highly dangerous. We must all resist the urge to see this shocking behaviour as the new normal.
Now we know the “tough guy” talk from Elon Musk is a lie.
We should have known that when Musk told Disney CEO Bob Iger and other advertisers to “go fuck yourself” in 2023, he didn’t mean it.
He followed this up months later in a surprise appearance at Cannes Lions, with yet more empty words: “In some cases, there were advertisers who were insisting on censorship… we’re going to support free speech rather than agree to be censored for money, which is, I think, the right, moral decision.”
The right, moral decision?
From a man so casually deceitful that he will promote lies about British hospitals being overrun by migrants, even when images from a Batman film are used as “proof”.
Or that the US government has abandoned its Nasa astronauts in space.
Those lies are not cherry-picked from ancient history. They are from last week.
What happened to free speech?
Another revelation from last week was that Musk’s toxic social media platform, X, has now apparently resorted to threatening behaviour.
The Wall Street Journal reports that X CEO Linda Yaccarino and her colleagues have been pressing Interpublic to get its clients to spend more money on X.
IPG execs interpreted X’s messaging as a reminder that the Donald Trump administration could slow down the Omnicom merger deal, which may need regulatory approval. Musk is, of course, a key player in The Trump Catastrophe Part 2, as a perk for weaponising X in favour of the buffoon.
Neither IPG nor X has denied the veracity of this story.
That shakedown reportedly happened in December, before X launched another lawsuit this month against major companies including Lego and Shell for not buying ads on X.
And that came after Musk destroyed the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media — an imperfect but worthwhile effort to stop ad money from funding violent extremism. The same extremism that led to the live-streamed Christchurch massacre being spread on Facebook and YouTube.
So we have a media owner, X, whose business has lost any credibility it once had for being a propaganda machine for far-right cranks, now fighting for survival by sucking up to government while routinely throwing out lies and threats.
Whatever you do today, please remember: this is not normal.
And it must never be considered normal.
No, this is not fine
I’ve seen a worrying trend of people responding to the rise of American authoritarianism with a shrug of the shoulders. “Perhaps this is just the way things are now.”
It’s painful to accept that things we thought were normal are being ripped away by aspiring dictators and plutocrats. That our way of life as moderate, liberal and tolerant citizens is under attack by people with too few brains and too much power.
Many of us respond to this crisis with normalcy bias: a mental dysfunction where we underestimate the likelihood or impact of a disaster because we cling to the belief that things will always function as they have in the past.
This mindset can be fatal.
We saw this five years ago, as we began learning what Covid-19 was.
As late as early February 2020, then UK prime minister Boris Johnson mentioned “coronavirus” only once in a speech about free trade. And even then, he wrote off the looming reports as “bizarre autarkic rhetoric”.
Normalcy bias also wrecks our ability to handle the concept of climate change.
There is now overwhelming evidence from scientists that the damage has already been done and that huge, permanent changes to our way of life are about to hit us in waves (maybe literal waves).
But we barely acknowledge this, let alone have a conversation about what to do.
We are that oblivious dog in that meme telling ourselves: ”This is fine.”
No. It’s time to wake up.
Advertising and media rely on two things that we’ve taken for granted: laws that protect a free and fair market, and a democratic system that upholds them.
Right now, both are under attack.
Platforma non grata
So we do what decent people have always done in the face of men (it’s always men, sadly) who seek to destroy the things we’ve built for their own ends.
We band together with strength in numbers. We are a community with immense power to make our world more informed, interesting and prosperous.
X stands against all of that as a weapon of ignorance and hatred.
It’s time for every single media owner that cares about democracy and free markets to stop all engagement with X.
It’s time for every single brand to suspend advertising on X. Hardly a sacrifice, wiser people than I would argue.
It’s time for politicians and government officials (the ones who aren’t handing Musk their secrets) to stop posting on X.
It’s time for more of our influential trade bodies and marketing associations to call out this type of behaviour.
This is not normal. Never, ever accept that this is normal. Or that there’s nothing you can do about it.
Omar Oakes was founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years and was previously media and tech editor of Campaign. His column on The Media Leader was nominated for the BSME’s B2B Column of the Year in 2024.