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Content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Which also means it’s sometimes difficult to tell garden variety fuckups apart from the rich and powerful putting their finger on the scale. On Friday, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that all of the major social media platforms were rejecting attempts by distributor Bleecker Street to advertise the upcoming Alex Gibney four hour epic Musk documentary.
We’ve already discussed how Elon Musk’s favorite lawyer Alex Spiro was threatening everyone associated with the film, and there were reports that Comcast NBC was getting cold feet about releasing the film (which they’ve since denied). Still, the film — which digs into Musk’s Tesla safety record, his Mars ambitions, and his four-month stint running DOGE — is scheduled to hit theaters on October 9th. But it was notable that all the big social media platforms were in lock-step in refusing to allow ads for it:
YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram and Facebook owner Meta are all declining to run the trailer for Musk, along with X itself, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
And, I mean, sure, X refusing the ads on its “free speech absolutist” owner’s platform is no surprise. We already know that he’s losing his shit about the documentary, what with the threat letters and the public whining. We also already know what a censorial brat Elon is, so there was zero chance he’d allow such ads.
But those others? Come on.
The real question is how much of this is just crappy systems and how much is billionaire oligarchs having each others’ backs. In the case of Meta, there have been complaints in the past that its automated ad review tools are notoriously quick to reject any documentary film, so this might just be run-of-the-mill “we’re bad at this” rather than Zuck protecting Musk (Zuck’s got his own Aaron Sorkin movie to worry about this week).
Meta’s ad policy specifically lumps together “ads about social issues, elections or politics” into one category, which presents challenges for social-issue documentaries, because the platform treats political ads—for example, those that are made to support a particular candidate—exactly the same as ads that support a social issue or cause. Though all advertisers need to adhere to basic Meta’s Community Standards, ads about “social issues, elections or politics” require further restrictions.
Either way, after a weekend of public outrage, at least YouTube and Meta appeared to back down, claiming it was all a big mistake:
Following an outcry over potential suppression, YouTube and Meta are changing direction on an ad for an Elon Musk documentary.
Bleecker Street, the studio behind Alex Gibney’s upcoming Musk, will be allowed to buy an ad for the trailer on the platform after all, a YouTube spokesperson tells The Hollywood Reporter. The trailer “was temporarily restricted by our system. Following review, the ad has been cleared to run,” the company said, also posting the message to social media.
Meanwhile, a Meta spokesperson tells THR that a decision to reject the ad “was an error and we’re restoring the ads.”
TikTok and X, however, still appear to be blocking the ads. Oh, and X has reportedly gone a step further, refusing ads for any Bleecker Street-distributed movie.
X is reportedly refusing to communicate with Bleecker Street, and has so far refused to accept advertising for any of its upcoming films.
Gosh, the “free speech absolutist” sure seems picky about which speech he’ll support promoting on his platform.
The whole situation is a reminder of two important things about moderation decisions: (1) not all of them are made by scheming bosses intent on evil. Sometimes they just make stupid mistakes. But also, (2) some of them are deliberately done. The real problem is that it’s next to impossible to sort out the difference between the two, and that often leads people to assume that mistakes that fall into camp (1) are really from camp (2).
Oh, and one important coda to all that: public pressure can work to reverse the stupid mistakes. Meta and YouTube, at least, have enough people on staff who realized just how bad the rejection of the ad buys looked, and were able to reverse course within a couple days. It’s unlikely that X will do the same.
Anyway, even without the ad buy, the latest trailer is available as a normal video on YouTube, so you can watch that just fine.
It seems quite likely that the attention paid to the original rejections drove a ton of “earned” media to that trailer. Way more than would have come through the ad-backed versions. Yet another example of The Streisand Effect in action. You’d think that Elon would recognize that, given that he regularly refers to The Streisand Effect whenever people he dislikes are accused of suppressing content…
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