Calls to cancel Disney’s streaming service surged on social media after billionaire Elon Musk singled out Disney CEO Bob Iger as a leader of the advertising boycott against Musk-owned platform X.
Influential right-wing accounts such as End Wokeness, Libs of TikTok, Zero Hedge, and Elon Musk (Parody) urged subscribers to drop Disney+ and Disney-owned Hulu in response to the advertising pullout by the Walt Disney Company and other marquee firms.
Those companies also include Apple, IBM, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Comcast, and Warner Bros. Discovery, according to media reports.
“Stop giving money to people that hate you. Cancel Disney+ and pass it on,” End Wokeness said Thursday on X.
Numerous commenters said they had dropped Disney+, in some cases posting their email cancellation confirmations.
“Cancel Hulu and Cancel Disney Plus are now both breakout trends on Google Trends as viewers apparently respond to their efforts to censor and cancel Elon Musk and X. Fate loves irony,” said conservative pundit Ian Miles Cheong on X.
“Canceled” was trending on X at various times Thursday, although some of those references were to MSNBC’s decision to drop pro-Palestinian host Mehdi Hasan’s show.
Conservative host Benny Johnson declared on his YouTube show: “Thousands CANCEL Disney+ After Elon Says ‘Go F*** Yourself!’ to Bob Iger.”
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 30, 2023
Mr. Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, made it clear Wednesday at the New York Times’s DealBook Summit that he had no intention of begging advertisers to return.
“If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me, blackmail me with money, go f*** yourself. Go f*** yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is,” Mr. Musk said onstage to a visibly surprised audience. “Hey, Bob [Iger], here in the audience. That’s how I feel. Don’t advertise.”
Left-wing groups sought to kneecap X, formerly Twitter, after Mr. Musk bought it last year and vowed to turn it into a free-speech platform following years of complaints about shadow-banning and suppression of conservative views, including the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
The recent advertising boycott was triggered by two events: a Nov. 16 report by left-wing Media Matters for America accusing X of placing ads next to neo-Nazi content, and Mr. Musk’s Nov. 15 comment agreeing with a post accusing Jewish communities of pushing “hatred against whites.”
Mr. Musk apologized Wednesday for the post, calling it “foolish” and saying that “it might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve done.”
“And I’ve tried my best to clarify six ways from Sunday, but you know at least I think it’ll be obvious that in fact far from being antisemitic, I’m in fact philosemitic,” he said, wearing a dog tag in support of Israeli hostages taken prisoner by the terrorist group Hamas.
Mr. Musk visited Israel earlier this week and met with top leaders. Last week, he filed a defamation lawsuit against Media Matters, accusing the liberal pressure group of gaming its search results.
Mr. Iger said at the DealBook summit that “we know Elon is larger than life in many respects.”
“By him taking the position that he took in quite a public manner, we just felt that the association with that position and Elon Musk and X was not necessarily a positive one for us,” Mr. Iger said. “And we decided we would pull our advertising.”
He added that “we are allowing entities of the company” to use X as a platform, citing the ABC Network.
Libertarian filmmaker Robby Starbuck dubbed the anti-Disney boycott effort “Operation Bend the Knee.”
“Operation #BendTheKnee has begun. We have the power to make @Disney bend the knee to us by resuming ads here,” he said on X.
“Don’t make one purchase that gives them a dime. End @disneyplus subscriptions. No Disney Christmas gifts for kids. Force Bob Iger to bend the knee to us and @elonmusk.”
