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Are they anticipating where the market is going, or where the ADL, NYT, and advertisers are going? Of course any CEO is going to factor them into their business proceedings. But it leaves the very likely possibility that the CEO is not demonetizing people or terminating deals because he's worried about his userbase rebelling against him and jumping ship, but because he's worried about a hit piece, ad networks getting the willies, or being subjected to all sorts of extended, motivated muckraking if they decide otherwise. CEOs are also not a separate species from humans; they socialize, fret, have principles with about as much 'integrity' as anybody else, and are subjected to many of the same social pressures most other people deal with, even if their venues and peers are gilded upper-class. I don't think they mind losing some money if they already have a lot, somebody else is willing to cover their losses with ESG funds, or if they can sit in security with no viable competition. And this should go without saying, but they too can be stupid.
I contend that when people refer to the free market, they usually mean a decision or assessment gleamed by the aggregate, collective spending decisions of consumers en masse - if a plurality of citizens respond positively or negatively to a product, as expressed by how much money they threw at it, and if it's enough to keep production going. You are pointing to a small cadre of Lords and Tastemakers who either step in before the product hits shelves - or has them removed because Sprint Mobile doesn't like having a booth next to it or whatever - while using that same term. These are clearly very different things. And if you insist on using that framing with justifications such as "Well, of course CEO anticipations and decision making are part of the market!", that's... fine, I guess. I can't even say you're wrong on any technical level.
But be clear. Because this always comes off as a low-effort gotcha. If the stuff I want to reward or patron are being removed from the menu by executive or committee's political fiat, the free market did not operate as most people would understand it. And yet, many progs will insist it did, if only for the cynical retainment of the feel-good glow around "every voice must be heard" and "power to the people" sentiments you need to half-heartedly pay lip service to so people don't see what's really going on.
Remember that the Artist Formerly Known As Twitter is a (mostly) advertising-funded social network, so the advertisers are the customers. Russel Brand and his fanbase are the product. Recalling a possibly-contaminated product before confirming whether or not it really is contaminated is very normal commercial behaviour. Trying to get ahead of your customers by responding to a press campaign run by the media they read (which is the NYT for bigcorp marketing execs) is also normal corporate behaviour.
Musk is trying to move to a subscription model because he wants to run a social media network with free speech for right-wing American witches (but not left-wing investigative journalists or dissidents in the dictatorships where his other companies do business). He knows that the only people willing to advertise on media which is full of witches are alt-med and crypto scammers, and is trying to avoid that trap.
Distortion of media based on advertiser preferences is as old as media. "Married fathers are doofuses" predates modern feminism - it happened because the TV sitcoms where the meme originated were funded by adverts for packaged detergent (hence the term "soap opera") and the advertisers wanted to appeal to the women buying the detergent.
How would advertisers be "poisoned" by "consuming" Brand's fanbase?
Advertisers get publicly called out for advertising with 'problematic' people or groups pretty regularly. You can often see it happening on the front page of Reddit when there's some new scandal around someone who hasn't been fully demonetized yet.
That creates negative brand associations that are like hot coals in the face of any director of marketing for a large company. Avoiding and smoothing over shit like that is a large fraction of their job description.
One screencap of a Coke advertisement sitting above a Brand tweet on the left, with a screencap of a lurid accounting from an anonymous accuser on the right, is all it takes to make a 'Why is Coke supporting rapists?' meme that will reach the frontpage.
This will get X and angry letter from Coke, which they'd rather avoid.
And again, none of that is really good, but it is based on the fear of how normal consumers who see that meme will alter their purchasing decisions because of it. It's how the free market works in our particular hell world.
This seems pretty heavy on assertions, and light on evidence, doesn't make any comparative analysis to competing theories to show it's more plausible then them, and doesn't even answer the question that was asked, just kick the can down the road. Ok, so a bunch of redditors ask 'Why is Coke supporting rapists?', what is the evidence that this "poisons" Coke in any way?
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I think my point here is that these have never, actually, been different things in practice.
Libertarian types talk about the invisible hand as though it were the abstract ideal case where every consumer has access to every possible product and perfect knowledge to make the best choice for themselves and products only ever succeed or fail based on those choices.
But they also invoke the invisible hand to justify real things that happened in real markets, which never, ever work like that.
Those two version of the term are inextricably confounded with each other already, at least in political discourse.
So it's an isolated demand for rigor if you point at the market responding to things you don't like and say 'that's not the invisible hand, there's real politik involved that's different from the ideal hypothetical case that term refers to!', then the next day invoke the invisible hand to justify some outcome of the market that you like.
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