Let's play a parlour game titled "What's the dumbest thing Elon Musk has ever done?" Is it promoting tweets from outspoken antisemites and racists on X, the social media platform he owns? Embracing antisemitic tweets himself? Or was it, telling some of the largest corporations in the world to, um, perform a sexual act on themselves because they stopped advertising on the platform? Maybe the top prize goes to his reinstating thousands of accounts of Nazis, white supremacists and disinformation purveyors that had been banned from Twitter by its previous management? Actually, my vote goes to the federal lawsuit X filed on Aug 6 accusing big advertisers of colluding in a boycott of the platform, ostensibly because they disapprove of its content. The filing was announced in a video tweet by Linda Yaccarino, the chief executive of X. Yaccarino's hostage-like affect and her theatrical hand-wavings in the video are so eerie that some viewers speculated, also on X, that the video is an AI-generated deepfake.
And why not? Musk himself promoted on X a deepfake fabricating a purported speech by Kamala Harris with the words, "This is amazing." The lawsuit targets the World Federation of Advertisers, a networking organization for big advertisers. It specifically names WFA and four companies - the Danish energy company Orsted, CVS Health and the consumer companies Unilever and Mars.
Why it singles out those companies isn't entirely clear, though it's notable that they are members or have le.