No one should hero-worship Elon Musk. It’s not because he doesn’t do cool stuff–he builds rockets, marketed a flamethrower for consumer use, and turned Twitter for toxic hellscape into something that doesn’t suck. He does cool stuff–but because he’s a man. People are fallible and if you avoid hero worship, you avoid your heroes eventually letting you down.
But it’s hard sometimes, in part because of what he did with Twitter, now X.
And for Smith & Wesson, that makes a huge difference after Facebook acted like Facebook.
After its Facebook account was suspended, the popular American gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson thanked Elon Musk and X for supporting free speech amid what it called ongoing attacks against the First and Second Amendments.
Andy Stone, a representative for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, told Fox News Digital that the account had been suspended in error and that it has since been restored.
In a Friday post on X, however, Smith & Wesson emphasized the importance of Musk’s stance on free speech, criticizing Meta for suspending their account after the platform flagged several of its posts for promoting the sale of weapons.
Founded in 1852 in Norwich, Connecticut, today Smith & Wesson is based in Maryville, Tennessee, and is one of the most recognized gun brands in America, reporting $535.8 million in sales in the 2024 fiscal year.
Smith & Wesson said that “despite our extensive efforts and resources spent on trying to adhere to Facebook’s ever-changing community guidelines on firearms, our account was suspended indefinitely on Friday, November 22nd, 15 years after its original creation.”
The manufacturer shared a screenshot of the suspension notice it had received from Facebook in which the platform said several posts dated Nov. 22, 13 and July 18 violated the rules on promoting weapons.
Now, Facebook doesn’t let people like you and me promote firearm sales, but there’s supposed to be an exception for brick-and-mortar stores. And, to their credit, Facebook restored Smith & Wesson’s page.
But the issue is that Facebook suspended it in the first place.
As noted by the company, their community guidelines seem to be ever-changing and impossible to keep up with, but they also take a strange view of content in general. I’ve caught restrictions for stuff I shared that was already on Facebook, for example. For a company like Smith & Wesson, though, it should be something that never happens. Yes, they’re promoting firearms. Literally anything they post will be promotion, just like with every other company.
If this was an algorithm-driven ban, that’s still on Facebook.
Which brings us to Musk and X.
The site is still far from perfect. While it’s touted as a free-speech site, some people claim to have been bounced from the site over relatively benign things that, they feel, shouldn’t have resulted in any kind of corrective action by a free-speech site.
That said, at least a company like Smith & Wesson can market their products without worrying about being suspended, particularly from stuff that’s five months old. Musk’s version of social media is a lot more like the old products that made social media such a part of people’s lives. It became a key part of companies’ marketing strategy and a way that smaller companies could compete in the marketplace.
Now, Facebook is reacting to legitimate companies just trying to sell their lawful products, then pretending they did nothing of the sort.
That doesn’t happen on X.
Read the full article here
