YouTube, TikTok and Meta have all turned down the trailer for the Oct. 9 doc, citing “political” content. X won’t even take Bleecker Street’s calls. The distributor is appealing.
So much for free speech.
The studio releasing Alex Gibney’s new Elon Musk documentary Musk is finding itself unable to buy an ad on the biggest social platforms.
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.
That last one is perhaps understandable, given its owner. But the rejection by the other platforms has taken distributor Bleecker Street by surprise, and it is internally scrambling to understand why the ad has been rejected, according to a person familiar with the company’s processes who is not authorized to talk about them publicly.
The unwillingness of platforms to accept even paid advertising is sure to raise concerns about free speech and the dwindling number of companies that control many of the platforms in this country — and ironically provide a proof-text for the very point the film is coming to make. Gibney’s doc is a four-hour look at a title character who attempts to control the conversation in various ways, including with alleged suppressions on X, which he bought in 2022.
Bleecker Street opens Musk in theaters on Oct. 9.
Blocking political ad content… during the time in which I am being deluged with ridiculously biased political ads.
That is legitimately hilarious reasoning. The tears are of laughter.
In 2024, 10% of Meta’s annual revenue ($16B) was derived from ads for scams or banned goods (Source). Even better, they actually charge a higher price for ads that are automatically flagged as potentially problematic, augmenting the revenue generating capability of, and Meta’s dependence on, these ads. Internal documents also showed that Meta consciously chose a tempered approach to combatting such ads because of the revenue they bring in. But Zuckerberg draws the line at accepting ad revenues from a movie about an awful tech bro. Cool.
i’m surprised people still see ads at all, ublock is the goat
YouTube on my TV. Haven’t figured out how to block those.
I saw a dumbass NEWSMAX ad while I was at a bar the other night. The only good thing that came out of it was that I connected with someone to make fun of it together. Unity.