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.
Just a reminder that YouTube played Trump ads non stop in 2024. Non fucking stop.
Someone should sue them for a collective boycott. I heard some fat dunce did that once.
Well I already hate musk and basically nothing could change my mind about him at this point - so I wasn’t planning to see this. But now I feel I must, since it’s apparently so subversive you can’t even advertise it.
I think he’s kind of a placeholder for everything that I hate about the world.
Ironic that he reifies the Epstein class yet wasn’t even cool enough to get invited to Epstein island
I’ve seen the ads they run. I don’t believe they wouldn’t run it. I don’t believe a human even looks at them at Google or Facebook. Perhaps the ad LLM has strong instructions not to make Trump or its cronies look bad.
More likely this is just a marketing stunt.
Could easily see that. I do torrent all my media and I barely ever get around to watching movies I’m actually excited about, so don’t worry about me.
Streisand effect incoming…
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.
There’s the answer… Gibney just produces a few fake slop product ads to submit,
“My husband’s baseball bat could not hit no more home runs in middle off my legs, before we did this one trick for hard good sex, he looked like this so pathetic [play full musk trailer]”
“I noticed at 40, sex women around me say hey, you’re a bad weird and ugly. And I guess I was, because I see old footage and can’t believe I looked like this before taking Power Vitamin 7, so much an idiot and smelled very bad also [play full musk trailer]”
“Don’t ever do apologies to work people. Do you want to have 600% confidence more by today? If you don’t, you will keep look such bitch and have a sad face always like this is [full musk trailer]”
i’m surprised people still see ads at all, ublock is the goat
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.
YouTube on my TV. Haven’t figured out how to block those.
grayjay.app and chromecast
Google really shot themselves in the foot by killing off the original Chromecast protocol. Ad-blocking on your TV used to be hard because the actual Chromecast device would play the video and it had hardcoded DNS entries you couldn’t overwrite. Nowadays it’s just a receiver for streams and it’s trivial to block ads simply by using an app that doesn’t show them.
I use SmartTube from F-Droid on my TV which works pretty good except for some occasional buffering.
The Major Social Media Platforms Are All Rejecting Paid Ads for Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’, Kicking off Brilliant Viral Marketing Campaign (Exclusive)
Makes me wonder if it really is the case or Bleeker is trying to manufacture some viral attention here. Either way: fun!
They’re all run by literal fascists, and it’s about a fascist. Not sure why anyone is surprised, and what they actually expected?
lol when they did this to stop misinformation during Covid etc they got railed over by the MAGA lot about infringing on rights and becoming a dictatorship etc
Even though they’re companies with a right to do anything they want with their own platform. Even if it is a corrupt action to appease a crybaby billionaire.
Yet where are they now
Irony, it has layers
In their defense, the difference there is it was the government that asked them to stop spreading the information. Which makes it arguably a 1st amendment violation.
No more than not being allowed to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre.
It’s four hours and showing in theaters? We have got to convince theater operators to bring back intermissions.
The small independant theaters in Seattle often have intermissions and they sometimes play old timey concession ads
let’s all go to the lob-by
It has one. Or it did at Venice.
Now tell me where can I watch it.
Would be funny if a rip were posted on Twitter.
Legacy Social Media
Banned in Boston.
I would venture to say where there’s a will there’s a way. The people that want to see it will find it.
IF they hear about it.
It’s a noisy world, rich with distractions, and I’d guess that mainstream media’s coverage will be muted.Hopefully I’m wrong, tho.
Not on social media, they won’t. :(
