MOST OF THOSE TWITTER/X ADVERTISERS WILL BE BACK VERY SOON

This is good, I suppose:

A torrent of prominent brands halted their advertising on X on Friday, dealing a massive reputational blow to Elon Musk’s social media company after his public embrace this week of an antisemitic conspiracy theory favored by White supremacists.

The high-profile advertiser revolt includes some of the world’s largest media companies, such as Disney, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Comcast, Lionsgate and Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent of CNN.

X also reportedly lost Apple, according to multiple news outlets....

But I'm sure most of these companies will be back next year, if not sooner. Remember an earlier round of corporate virtue-signaling?

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 riots ... dozens of companies including Walmart, Comcast and Lockheed Martin said they would either suspend political donations entirely or specifically cut off Republicans who echoed Trump’s stolen election claims or voted against certifying the election results.

But over the next two years, amid a contentious midterm battle, less than half of those companies kept those promises for a full election cycle....

POLITICO identified more than 100 companies and business groups that pledged to suspend or review donations or take the events of Jan. 6 into account when making future political contributions.... Campaign finance records show that more than 70 of those companies’ affiliated political committees resumed donations to at least one member who voted against election certification.

Corporations are not our friends. If a corporation has continued to advertise on the increasingly troll-dominated, Nazified Twitter/X for the past year and now says it needs to stop, that pause will last only until the public outrage blows over. I hope some of these advertisers will make the pause permanent, but I'm not holding my breath. I see more and more relatively high-profile individuals bailing on the site, and that's good, but everyone with a sense of common decency should leave. That won't happen, though, and Twitter/X will endure in Muskified form well into next year, if not beyond. At this point, whether by design or not, Elon Musk's financial losses are like Charles Koch's donations to right-wing groups: money spent with no thought of direct financial return, in the hope of having a profound influence on the culture. Sure, Musk would also like to turn a profit, but he's getting out of Twitter much of what he wants to get out of it. We don't have to help him.