“What a d*ck move!” Tesla CEO and soon-to-be-owner-of-Twitter Elon Musk responded to a tweet featuring a Breitbart News article claiming that Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates “poured millions” into 11 of the 26 organizations that “signed an open letter last month urging Twitter advertisers to boycott the company if Elon Musk restores free speech on the platform.”
These 26 civil society organizations recently wrote a letter addressed to Twitter’s biggest advertisers, including Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Disney. They called on these advertisers to force the social media platform to “uphold the practices that serve as guideposts for other Big Tech platforms,” and to “commit to these standards as non-negotiable requirements for advertising on the platform.”
The letter, which stated that Musk’s takeover of the platform “will further toxify our information ecosystem and be a direct threat to public safety, especially among those already most vulnerable and marginalized,” is a response to self-described “free speech absolutist” Musk’s intention to roll back what the platform has achieved in their content moderation policies limiting hate speech and election misinformation.
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“Under Musk’s management, Twitter risks becoming a cesspool of misinformation, with your brand attached, polluting our information ecosystem in a time where trust in institutions and news media is already at an all-time low,” they wrote.
Breitbart News, which is a far-right publication, claims that according to an analysis done by the recently-formed Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), “hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions from the letter signatories back to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”
FFO, which is so new that its website is still under construction as of this writing, was founded by Mike Benz, former President Donald Trump’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Policy Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs.
The Daily Mail also initially reported that the groups who sent the signed letter are funded by or connected to another billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and former US Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
Gates is known to have spent billions on vaccines, and during the pandemic has been the target of disinformation. More recently, the tech pioneer said that a Musk-owned Twitter “could be worse.”
Meanwhile Musk, who’s known to respond in emojis and memes, has previously trolled Gates on Twitter after he accused the philanthropist of shorting Tesla.
Information for this briefing was found via Twitter and the sources mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to the organizations discussed. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
