But since when did using a business's product come to require sharing (or not sharing) political views with the business's owner? Seems to me that this is what has changed.

PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.

In the case of X, the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feeds and overriding the context of his AI bot to parrot his pet ideas.

If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”

In the past, most business owners would perhaps quietly donate to a party or candidates, but probably wouldn't hang their ideology out in front of people all day, every day. Think about someone like Warren Buffett. He has political views, but they are not something he's out there loudly airing on a huge platform.

And like I pointed out, these are not just any old "political views". It's extremist stuff that in the past would have gotten you ostracized. I'm old enough to remember Trent Lott losing his Senate leadership position, for instance.

Also, because of "network effects", simply providing content to Twitter makes the site more valuable.

It didn't used to be nearly as common for owners of midsize to large businesses to be loudly outspoken politically, especially those holding more extreme views. It used to be common sense to keep that sort of thing to oneself, if only to avert PR disaster. Not knowing when to shut up was more of a hallmark of the stereotypical two-bit owner of a crappy local business that perpetually struggled to grow.

This helped keep a neutral or at worst ambivalent image of these owners in the minds of the larger public and thus for the most part didn't factor into purchase decisions.

It's now easier than ever to see the true character of a business owner and so it's only natural that customers have begun to factor in this information in purchase/usage decisions.

That's because they don't stay in their lane as business owner, but use the proceeds of that business (and a bunch of others) to influence world politics in a way that no single individual should ever be able to.

I expect people to be different.

I don’t expect them to provide a platform for people who make it a point to hate others and advocate for removal of their / my rights and so on.

X/twitter is a media company. choosing which media products to purchase based on political values is how it has always worked.

Do you believe that boycotting is a new behavior?

Well, part of the product is Elon's posts and his editorial choices that go into the algorithm. Also your example of the newspaper is also odd, because newspapers were and are well known to be influenced by their publishers and people very often will trash them if they have a contrary ideological bent

Why should I contribute to the wealth of a man who wants people like me dead? Why should I tolerate others who happily contribute to my own oppression?

It isn't strictly required and it hasn't changed; it's always been complicated and it's always been a balance. This isn't speculation or a hot take. Consumer boycotts are as old as the hills, so it's an observable fact that our relationship with firms and their politics has been complicated and negotiated for a very long time.

Regarding your later edit:

> PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.

It really shouldn't surprise you that if you express something that's a bit of a hot take that you'll get a reaction to it. You shouldn't draw any more of an inference from it then "people are passionate about this and some of them disagree with me." Whether people do so amicably or not has at least as much to do with the problems with the Internet as a means of communication as the issue itself.

Regardless, this status quo you refer to was mostly imagined. How much pressure people exert to boycott some platform or another waxes and wanes, because the underlying disagreements wax and wane in relevance. That doesn't really make it a new thing, just a new phase in the same unfolding history.

That's why you refer to the press barons in the era of yellow journalism - the past is not an undifferentiated mass where everyone held some set of values that have fallen from favor. To the people who were alive at the time, things were contentious and in flux and the future was uncertain.

We have a tendency to flatten the past and imagine it as a straightforward narrative where we necessarily arrived at where we are today because of the inevitable interaction of historical forces, and similarly to flatten the people who lived at the time as being caricatures who reliably held a certain set of values. But they disagreed with each other, viewed the future as up for grabs like we do, and they changed their minds as history unfolded.

Im not sure where your sense of history is coming from. One of the US‘s founding events was a boycott of British goods for political reasons.

I keep saying this, but do you remember a single political remark made by owners of Toyota or BMW? Do you even know who owns these companies without looking it up?

People aren't raking through Musk's obscure remarks to find something objectionable. Musk has been force-spraying his political opinions onto everyone for quite a while, and people have gotten tired of it.

Aptly, given Elon's ancestry, did the whole anti-apartheid movement simply pass you by?

Probably around the same time as the Citizens United decision. Supporting a business with your money also means supporting the things they choose to spend that money on

First, as others have pointed out, it's always been like that up to a point. But that's not the problem with X.

I didn't leave X when Musk acquired Twitter, and I'm not scandalised by people's political positions, even when they're extreme. But a position and behaviour are two very different things (e.g. being a racist vs making a Nazi salute on live television). I left when the atmosphere amplified by the site became... not for me. I won't go into a pub full of football hooligans not because I disagree with their club affiliation but because their conduct creates an atmosphere that's not for me.

As for newspapers (even ignoring those with political party affiliations, something that was common in newspapers' heyday), most of them preserved some kind of civil decorum, and those that didn't weren't read by those who wanted some decorum. How civilised some environment is is not a matter of political position.

Also, there were always some people of influence that held extreme views. But such people behaving in an uncivilised manner in public was less common (and certainly less accepted).

Buying a newspaper has always been a political act

Most people hold a set of political views, while also admitting a spectrum of competing views into their personal, financial, etc. lives. For the average person, doing business with a neo-Nazi (or someone who is "merely" neo-Nazi adjacent) exceeds that spectrum. This is eminently reasonable, and has not changed significantly in a long time.

No one would say they used "David Duke's Whites Only Car Wash" but "didn't support the owner's politics."

You might investigate the origin of the term 'boycott.' It turns out that ostracizing someone's business for political reasons has a long and cherished history. Colt and S&W were targets because their owners cooperated with Clinton's gun control efforts. And to your point, there are plenty of examples of that: https://www.unz.com/print/SocialJustice-1939may22-00001/

> To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement

That ... does not hold at all. You wouldn't buy or subscribe to an openly Nazi paper unless you are a full blown white supremacist.

The conflict seems as old as ever. Labor vs union-busting robber baron.

There are plenty of business' products that I use where I'm unaware of if I share or don't share the owner's political views and I'm totally fine using them. Elon Musk has made it impossible to not be aware of his political views by constantly shoving it down our throats.

It is the way they express those views.

I mean, there are a lot of conservatives I respect including Mitt Romney, Robert Nisbett, George Will, and Thomas Sowell. Then there are the jerks like William F. Buckley and David Horowitz. [1]

Then there is Musk who's below even them -- but I am not particularly offended by Hobby Lobby or Chicken-Fil-A.

[1] if you want to know the criteria I use take a look at this book https://www.amazon.com/Watch-Right-Conservative-Intellectual...

Not really. People have boycotted products for political and ideological motivations for a very long time. The change recently is that people stopped caring as much. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boycotts

When the business owner is in control over the algorithm that determines what you see on the product he owns.

It's not like they are separate at all, the owner is very active on the site as both a user and a god-moderator.

Personally I left Twitter less because Musk owns it now, and more because Musk's changes turned my previously tolerable feed into a deluge of far right drivel. Expecting me to keep using it is like expecting me to keep shopping at a grocery store that replaced its bread aisle with a swastika-festooned exhibit glorifying the conquests and exploits of Hitler and his Nazis---even if I am generally apolitical, I will have to start shopping somewhere that sells bread.

Notwithstanding the above, given how powerful network effects are in social media, I think boycotting platforms operated by people like Musk (I struggle to find the words to fully encompass how repulsive he has become) is arguably one of the more effective forms of protest available to people, and I encourage them to exercise it.

The Body Shop was fairly vocal about animal testing and Ben and Jerrys was famous for their political messages on their products and that was in the 80s. And Levi Strauss and their LGBTQ+ support.

If you were not aware of it, it is not because it wasn't happening. Historically, excepting media companies, left leaning companies have always been outspoken about this while right leaning ones believed in the idea of focusing on business and avoiding overt political messaging.

So companies like Exxon were not broadcasting their views but were still lobbying government directly to change the laws in a way that benefit them (see deregulation).

Social pressure has literally always existed. Nothing has changed lol.

And I wouldn't call white nationalism a "political" view, like it's some ordinary kind of opinion. That's sanewashing something disgusting and disgraceful. That type needs to get shoved back under the rock they crawled out from.

Musk’s account is the most engaged and followed account on Twitter. So Twitter is de facto his global soapbox.

(And most of the other top-engaged accounts are MAGA accounts: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...)

>But since when did using a business's product come to require sharing (or not sharing) political views with the business's owner?

Since 18th century at the very least; see: anti-slavery sugar boycott[1].

That's if you absolutely ignore the parent's point that political views are things like specifics of policy, not whether some people should be considered subhuman.

>Seems to me that this is what has changed.

It seems so because you don't know history, and didn't do a one-minute Google search for history of successful boycotts.

The article I'm linking is in the "bite-sized" category.

Enjoy.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z3rj7ty/revision/7

This question is a deflection and I suspect is intentionally disingenuous since it literally ignores the main point of the parent's comment.

TWFKAT (the website formerly known as Twitter) is not a product, it's Elon Musk's safe space. He bought it to be his sandbox and to use it to soothe his constantly battered and fragile ego. His own personal clubhouse where he sets the rules, and he's the ultimate authority. You can join if you want to be a part of his cult of personality, but don't fool yourself that you're dealing with a "product" and a "business".

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