In what should in no way be taken as a reminder that yelling at feckless tech billionaires doing something obnoxious until they inevitably fold like a cheap stepladder pretty much always works, YouTube and Meta have both walked back previous decisions to refuse to run paid ads for Alex Gibney’s new documentary Musk. And, of course, none of this came about because either tech giant initially decided not to piss off their rival Elon Musk by promoting a film that is, by all accounts, a pretty scathing indictment of him as a fast-talking con artist, before reversing course when the sight of pretty much every major social media service closing ranks against the doc turned out to be a really awful look; it’s just that their systems made a mistake! Silly systems.
This is per THR, which reports that Google and Meta have both said they’ll now take studio Bleecker Street’s money to promote the film, a three-hour examination of Musk’s various claims of being a business-founding visionary genius, and the actual harm he’s created in the world while doing so. YouTube, for its part, said the decision not to run ads (which became public yesterday, as the film moves toward its October 9 release date) was simply a temporary measure, saying it was “temporarily restricted by our system. Following review, the ad has been cleared to run.” Meta, meanwhile, just chalked this one up to a whoopsie, saying it was “an error, and we’re restoring the ads.” (Of course, this was after the studio reportedly had an initial appeal request rejected by Zuck And Co., and then after after Bleecker Street started publicizing this situation to outlets like TechCrunch. It’s amazing how helpful that sort of thing can be in the tech support world.)
To the shock of nobody, the folks over at Musk’s own Twitter have not discovered that they made a temporary error in rejecting the ads, and have made no statements on the decision not to promote the film at all. (TikTok has also been radio silent so far.) The ads will reportedly start running on YouTube and on Meta’s various platforms some time on Saturday.
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