Media Matters Honcho Tells on Himself
CEO Carusone Provides the "Context" of How He Bullied Twitter's Advertisers
Today I happened on a Twitter thread by someone called Angelo Carusone.
Carusone is the President and CEO of Media Matters for America, which means he is a lunatic progressive activist. His specialty seems to be ruining people’s livelihoods because they disagree with him.
In his bio on the Media Matters site, he claims responsibility for getting Macy’s to drop their partnership with Donald Trump in 2012, as well as getting Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly off of Fox News by bullying their advertisers.
I know you may not feel super bad for Trump, Beck, and O’Reilly, who are all going to be just fine, but this kind of targeting is an odd way to spend your time.
Anyway.
Carusone’s Twitter thread today was actually about Twitter. He claims to be providing important “context” about why Twitter is laying off employees and Musk seems concerned about the company’s revenue:
Okay, well that seems interesting. Everyone loves context. He goes on to explain that Twitter usually sells 15% - 20%, or $600 - $900 million of their ads for the upcoming year at an industry conference called NewFronts in May and this year they didn’t. Why didn’t they? Well, Carusone explains, a group called Stop the Deal “educated” a bunch of advertisers and fed them “basic questions” to ask Twitter representatives at the event, which apparently they didn’t have answers to. Carusone assures us that at this time, the groups coordinating this activity were not planning a boycott at all.
Of course, let’s remember that back in May it was far from clear that Musk’s Twitter purchase would even happen. In fact it was shortly before Musk announced he was putting the deal on hold.
So I wondered who these groups even were. Who is Stop the Deal?
As the name suggests, the group was dedicated to try to prevent Elon Musk from buying Twitter. And now that he has bought it they are dedicated to destroying the company. Their website asks visitors to sign onto a letter to Twitter advertisers asking them to boycott the platform unless Musk will conform to their idea of “brand safety and community standards.”
So is this some sort of industry group concerned about digital advertising and branding?
Far from it. The Stop the Deal coalition is a progressive activist group comprised of exclusively left wing organizations including Accountable Tech, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Fair Vote, Friends of the Earth, GLAAD, Media Justice, Move On, Public Citizen, Sum of Us, the Sparrow Project, Ultraviolet…
…and Media Matters for America.
Nowhere in his thread does Carusone indicate that he and the company he runs are at the heart of the movement to strangle Twitter to death by frightening their advertisers. No, he’s just dispassionately reporting some “context” on the stories of massive Twitter layoffs and fears of difficulties with advertising in the coming months.
I guess maybe he just couldn’t resist highlighting the importance of his own handiwork in sabotaging Twitter’s financial future. I bet he can’t wait to add it to his Media Matters bio.
So basically this is just our friend Angelo Carusone back at his favorite hobby, getting people fired. Of course this time it’s not Bill O’Reilly, it’s half the employees of Twitter and maybe even the whole company if he gets his way.
Progressives in the media are already freaking out that the firings are making the platform more dangerous and misinformation more prevalent, thus attempting to further damage the company with advertisers.
This is despite the fact that the head of Safety and Integrity at Twitter, who loves censoring conservatives, has been attempting to reassure everyone that nothing has changed at the platform and all the current policies and content moderation capabilities remain in place.
Nothing at Twitter has changed. And they are still trying to destroy it. All while innocently framing the debate as an organic movement in the digital advertising industry, a set of totally normal concerns advertisers just thought up on their own.
It is not.
This is a carefully planned project of left wing activists actively trying to bring down the company because someone bought it who might allow people to say things online that they disagree with.
Don’t let them play innocent.