TikTok banned the official account for Elon Musk documentary Musk on Friday, before reversing its decision. More here. If you want the latest example of what money can buy you, look at the fear around a bunch of platforms when it comes to the trailer for Alex Gibney’s new documentary, Musk. This is an extensive ... Elon Musk documentary | TikTok calls ban on its official account “an error”, others still blocking
TikTok banned the official account for Elon Musk documentary Musk on Friday, before reversing its decision. More here.
If you want the latest example of what money can buy you, look at the fear around a bunch of platforms when it comes to the trailer for Alex Gibney’s new documentary, Musk.
This is an extensive documentary feature about Elon Musk, a man most of us have basically seen radicalised in real time over the years. And either he owns the platform that US distributor Bleecker Street would look to promote the film on, his friends do, or his bank balance scares others away.
You won’t therefore see the trailer for Musk on whatever Twitter has basically turned into, and it was rejected too by TikTok (in which Larry Ellison, a friend of Musk’s, owns a part stake), YouTube, Meta and in turn Instagram.
This is the trailer that Bleecker Street struggled to place.
As you can see, it’s now appeared on YouTube, after the service reversed its original restrictions. Likewise, and it’s unclear whether the backlash was anything to do with this, Meta platforms now allow it as well. It remains banned from free speech platform X.
Over the weekend, TikTok though went one stage further than not playing the trailer: it banned the official Musk documentary account from its service altogether. The account was given a ‘permanent suspension’, and it sounds like it took a fair amount of drum banging to get the decision reversed. Said reversal duly came over the weekend, with a TikTok spokesperson telling The Verge that “I can confirm that the advertising account has been restored after an error.”
You can read more on the story here.
The film played in US cinemas over the weekend, and it was at the London Film Festival here in the UK earlier this month. But there’s no sign of an official UK cinema release at the moment, with Universal Pictures having the international rights to the documentary, and looking relatively nervous about using them.
More on Musk as we hear it. If you didn’t catch it at London Film Festival though, you might be in for quite a wait to see it on a UK cinema screen…
