The Major Social Media Platforms Are All Rejecting Paid Ads for Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ (Exclusive); The Hollywood Reporter, September 25, 2026

Steven Zeitchik, The Hollywood Reporter ; The Major Social Media Platforms Are All Rejecting Paid Ads for Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ (Exclusive)

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.

[Kip Currier: Another very clear example of the dangers and consequences of media consolidation and control by a handful of stakeholders.]

"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."

Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts; The New York Times, February 13, 2026

 Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac , The New York Times; Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

The department has sent Google, Meta and other companies hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or comment on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, officials and tech workers said.

"The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.

In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.

The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court."

This App Is a Dangerous Invasion of Your Privacy—and the FBI Uses It; Popular Mechanics, January 22, 2020

Courtney Linder, Popular Mechanics; This App Is a Dangerous Invasion of Your Privacy—and the FBI Uses It

"Even Google Wouldn't Build This

When companies like Google—which has received a ton of flack for taking government contracts to work on artificial intelligence solutions—won't even build an app, you know it's going to cause a stir. Back in 2011, former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said a tool like Clearview AI's app was one of the few pieces of tech that the company wouldn't develop because it could be used "in a very bad way."

Facebook, for its part, developed something pretty similar to what Clearview AI offers, but at least had the foresight not to publicly release it. That application, developed between 2015 and 2016, allowed employees to identify colleagues and friends who had enabled facial recognition by pointing their phone cameras at their faces. Since then, the app has been discontinued.

Meanwhile, Clearview AI is nowhere near finished. Hidden in the app's code, which the New York Times evaluated, is programming language that could pair the app to augmented reality glasses, meaning that in the future, it's possible we could identify every person we see in real time.

Early Pushback

Perhaps the silver lining is that we found out about Clearview AI at all. Its public discovery—and accompanying criticism—have led to well-known organizations coming out as staunchly opposed to this kind of tech.

Fight for the Future tweeted that "an outright ban" on these AI tools is the only way to fix this privacy issue—not quirky jewelry or sunglasses that can help to protect your identity by confusing surveillance systems."

The Ethical Dilemma at the Heart of Big Tech Companies; Harvard Business Review, November 14, 2019

Emanuel Moss and Jacob Metcalf, Harvard Business Review; The Ethical Dilemma at the Heart of Big Tech Companies

"The central challenge ethics owners are grappling with is negotiating between external pressures to respond to ethical crises at the same time that they must be responsive to the internal logics of their companies and the industry. On the one hand, external criticisms push them toward challenging core business practices and priorities. On the other hand, the logics of Silicon Valley, and of business more generally, create pressures to establish or restore predictable processes and outcomes that still serve the bottom line.

We identified three distinct logics that characterize this tension between internal and external pressures..."