by Jordan Schachtel
In the month since Elon Musk took the reins of Twitter, more than half of the company’s biggest advertisers have suspended ads on the platform. They’ve been driven into action through a relentless dark money political operation funded by some of the wealthiest individuals and organizations on the planet. Countless American and multinational corporations have bent the knee to accommodate this dark money political ruling class cancel campaign.
Under the guise of demanding a “safer” platform, the forces for technocratic tyranny and political censorship have, through their billionaire donor network, succeeded in chipping away at Twitter’s most potent revenue stream.
The Dossier has already reported on the origins of the campaign and its backers. We identified Arabella Advisors, a dark money progressive advocacy group funded through sister entities by the likes of Bill Gates, the Soros empire, and a far-left Swiss billionaire, as the network behind the anti-Twitter cancel and censorship campaigns.
Given the success of their ongoing advertiser boycott campaign, these same operatives have set their sights on a new mission: removing Twitter from the invaluable Apple and Google App Stores.
And there appears to be a coordinated campaign in major legacy media publications, many of which are influenced and funded by the dark money network, to convince the aforementioned App Store gatekeepers to pull the plug on Twitter. In recent days and weeks, The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other legacy media staples, have dedicated a considerable amount of opinion and pseudo reportage space to the App Store activism.
https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1595900416231079936
Last week, I made the decision to leave my role leading Trust & Safety at Twitter.
Today, I'm sharing a few thoughts about what comes next for the site. https://t.co/QPAQR6zpqU
— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 18, 2022
Elon Musk's vision of free speech absolutism flies in the face of millions who have died from #COVID19.
We're calling on advertisers to #StopToxicTwitter for the sake of public health, democracy, and common truths.https://t.co/y4GO4oofc2
— Accountable Tech (@accountabletech) November 29, 2022
Will the forces for censorship succeed?
Apple has already limited advertising on the platform (according to Elon Musk himself), along with some of its major stakeholders, including top shareholders BlackRock and Fidelity.
Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
The consideration to cancel Twitter couldn’t be coming at a more awkward time for Apple, who indirectly employ Chinese indentured servants to make their iPhones and other Apple products.
Zhengzhou, China 🇨🇳
Workers at the iPhone factory in Zhengzhou have had enough of zero Covid.
Ultimately, only people power can stop authoritarianism.pic.twitter.com/Jj8KX2eya1
— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) November 24, 2022
Apple has not only refused to speak out about the plight of Chinese laborers and Chinese citizens as a whole, they have routinely helped the Chinese Communist Party install surveillance measures to crack down on dissent. Apple has no moral high ground to stand upon, but they seem committed to action anyway.
In 2019, @Apple removed an app that helped Hong Kong protesters track the police and they just limited the use of AirDrop in China that anti-lockdown protesters were using to communicate and now they're threatening to de-platform Twitter as videos of protests in China go viral.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 28, 2022
The power of the App Store was put on display for the world to see when Big Tech deplatformed Parler, detonating the upstart company in a matter of days. Parler never recovered from the cancel campaign. Its user base departed for competitor sites and never came back.
It is one thing to cancel Parler, but it a much more ambitious project to take down Twitter.
Twitter has some 250 million daily active users, some of whom have now spent over a decade on the platform.
Also, an attempt to cancel Twitter could backfire for Apple and Google, and even jeopardize their monopolistic status in Big Tech. It’s a risky play for companies that have been running on autopilot for quite some time.