Big global brands are pulling advertising from X, formerly known as Twitter, after a media report charged the platform with promoting pro-Nazi content, an accusation that X has rebutted.
IBM, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Lions Gate Entertainment, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Disney confirmed to various media outlets that they were pausing ads on X. At a news briefing on Nov. 17, Johannes Bahrke, a spokesperson for the European Commission, stated that the group is freezing advertisements on X after it saw “an alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech on several social media platforms in recent weeks, and X is certainly quite effective of that.”
Corporate ads were appearing on “pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence, and neo-Nazi accounts,” according to the report, which included screenshots of such ad placements.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, slammed Media Matters for its report.
In a company statement, X said that the Media Matters report “completely misrepresented” the real experience of users on the platform and called it “another attempt to undermine freedom of speech and mislead advertisers.”
An executive at X told The Epoch Times that the platform “did a sweep on the accounts that Media Matters found, and they will no longer be monetizable.” In addition, the specific posts will also be labeled as “Sensitive Media.”
The executive clarified that the X system isn’t “intentionally placing a brand actively next to this type of content, nor is a brand actively trying to support this type of content with an ad placement.” Instead, “ads follow the people on X. In this case, the Media Matters researcher has its own user handle, and they are then actively looking for this content—that’s how user targeting works.”
“Groups like Media Matters aggressively search for posts on X and then go to the accounts, and if they see an ad, Media Matter researchers keep hitting refresh to capture as many brands as possible.”
Restricting Free Speech on X
X said in its statement that the platform “works to protect the public’s right to free speech.” However, for speech to be “truly free,” there must be freedom to see or hear things that some people may find objectionable. X stated that “everyone has the right to make up their own minds about what to read, watch, or listen to.”Despite that “clear and consistent position,” X has been attacked by several legacy media outlets and activist groups such as Media Matters, which seek to “undermine freedom of expression on [X] because they perceive it as a threat to their ideological narrative and those of their financial supporters.”
Such groups are trying to use their influence to attack X’s revenue streams by “deceiving advertisers,” the statement said.
X said that Media Matters “created an alternate account” and curated the content appearing on the account’s timeline. They then “repeatedly refreshed” the account timelines to find “rare instances of ads serving next to the content they chose to follow.”
“Our logs indicate that they forced a scenario resulting in 13 times the number of ads served compared to the median ads served to an X user.”
One of the brands whose ads were allegedly shown next to a pro-Nazi post per the Media Matters report had very low exposure, X said. The platform pointed out that this brand’s ads were shown adjacent to the post only two times and that only two people, one of whom is the author of the Media Matters report, had been exposed to this.
Speaking to The Epoch Times, the X executive said that the platform has implemented “stronger brand safety and suitability” controls than other networks and that these are capabilities that never existed in Twitter’s 17 years.
Musk and Anti-Semitic Charge
The exodus of big brands from X comes as Mr. Musk is also attracting criticism regarding anti-Semitism. In a comment, Mr. Musk agreed with a controversial post that accused Jewish communities of pushing “dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”Mr. Musk later clarified that “this does not extend to all Jewish communities” and placed blame on groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish advocacy group.
“[The ADL] unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel,“ Mr. Musk said. ”This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop.”
The White House also condemned Mr. Musk’s comments.
“It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of anti-Semitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said, according to Axios.
“When it comes to this platform—X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat anti-Semitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world—it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.”
