Elon Musk Makes Fun Of Twitter T-Shirts Linked To BLM Protests
Elon Musk is courting more controversy at Twitter Inc., posting a video making fun of old t-shirts at the social media service that date back to the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement.
(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk is courting more controversy at Twitter Inc., posting a video making fun of old t-shirts at the social media service that date back to the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Musk wrote that he found the shirts with #StayWoke printed in a closet at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. In a post he later deleted, he said the shirts stem from the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, that followed the 2014 fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Musk linked to a 2015 report by the US Justice Department on Brown’s death in the deleted post, writing that “‘Hands up don’t shoot’ was made up. The whole thing was a fiction.” In its 86-page report, the Justice Department said witnesses gave varying accounts of what Brown was doing with his hands as he moved toward Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot him.
The tweets risk further unsettling advertisers being pressured to stay away from Twitter due to concerns about hate speech and misinformation on the platform. Activists earlier this week renewed calls for a commercial boycott of the social media company after Musk reinstated former President Donald Trump’s account on the basis of a Twitter poll.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.