Neil Young just wants to keep rockin’ in a free world. Last year, the prolific folk artist made headlines for pulling his music off Spotify in protest of the streamer platforming Joe Rogan and his anti-vaccination rhetoric. Now, Young is also retracting his business from Twitter/X in protest of (who else) Elon Musk.
In a statement on the news section of his website—fittingly titled “NYA (Neil Young Archive) Times-Contrarian”—the “Harvest Moon” singer widely condemned the social media platform. “We are stopping all use of X that we can control. For reasons that should be obvious to the richest man on Earth, we are taking this action against his company,” Young wrote, along with a photo of Musk captioned, “Teslas should fly flags of love-not hate.”
This comes after a number of major companies including Disney, Apple, Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery, and more suspended ads on the platform last week in response to a Tweet that Musk called “the actual truth.” The original Tweet claimed that “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” and that “western Jewish populations” are disliked by “hordes of minorities that support flooding their country.”
In response to the uproar, X CEO Linda Yaccarino issued her own statement, writing, “X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board... X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.”
X’s efforts to right the ship aren’t good enough for Young, however. “For our many Palestinian and our many Jewish friends, we do need to start over in the present and release our terrible connections to the past,” he continued in his post. “As bad as they are, they need to be forgotten so we can be free to move on in life together, all humanity, focused on saving our planet for future generations of all people.”