Due to worries that their advertisements may appear alongside pro-Nazi material and hate speech on the platform overall, advertisers are avoiding X social media, whose billionaire owner Elon Musk stoked tensions by supporting antisemitic conspiracy theories in his own tweets.
This week, IBM said that it has ceased running advertisements on X following a report that claimed its advertisements were running alongside content that applauded Nazis. This is a new blow for X, which depends on big businesses and their ad expenditures to stay afloat.
In a study released on Thursday, the leftist advocacy group Media Matters said that advertisements from Comcast, Apple, Oracle, and NBCUniversal’s Bravo network were also shown next to antisemitic content on X.
The business released a statement saying, “IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination, and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this completely unacceptable situation.”
Requests for comments on what they planned to do next were not immediately answered by Apple, Oracle, NBCUniversal, or Comcast.
Separately on Friday, the executive branch of the European Union announced that it is stopping advertising on X and other social media platforms, partly due to an increase in hate speech. Disney, Lionsgate, and Paramount Global also said later in the day that they were stopping or suspending their X advertisements.
This week, in response to a user who charged Jews with detesting white people and demonstrating apathy towards antisemitism, Musk caused a stir with his own tweets. As a response on Wednesday, Musk tweeted, “You have stated the actual truth.”
Since acquiring the platform last year, Musk has been accused of allowing antisemitic statements, and since the start of the Israeli-Hamas conflict, the content on X has come under further scrutiny.
In response to Musk’s tweet on Friday, White House spokeswoman Andrew Bates stated, “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”
“X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board,” according to X CEO Linda Yaccarino.
She tweeted on Thursday, saying, “I think that’s something we can and should all agree on.”
Musk hired Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal executive, to mend fences with advertisers who had left after his takeover, fearing that his relaxation of content regulations was giving rise to divisive and poisonous speech that would damage their businesses.
Regarding this platform, X has also made it quite apparent that we are working to stop discrimination and antisemitism. It’s ugly and wrong, and it has no place in this world. Complete halt” stated Yaccarino.
According to a statement from X, the accounts that Media Matters discovered to be spreading antisemitic content will no longer be monetizable, and the particular posts will be classified as “sensitive media.” Yet Musk criticized Media Matters, calling it “an evil organization.”
The leader of the Anti-Defamation League responded to Musk’s tweets this week, in the most recent exchange between the billionaire businessman and the well-known Jewish civil rights group.
“It is undeniably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories at a time when antisemitism is surging in America and around the world,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt stated on X.
This week, Musk also sent a tweet expressing his “deep offense at ADL’s messaging and any other groups that push de facto anti-white racism, anti-Asian racism, or racism of any kind.”
The organization has previously charged Musk with facilitating the propagation of hate speech and antisemitism on the platform, as well as promoting the ideas of neo-Nazis and white nationalists who seek to outlaw the ADL.
In the meantime, the European Commission announced that it has suspended all of its social media advertising due to an “alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech” on several platforms in the last few weeks.
The executive body of the 27-nation EU, the commission, stated that the freeze has no bearing on its official accounts on X and that it is encouraging its services to “refrain from advertising at this stage on social media platforms where such content is present.”
With new regulations aimed at purging social media platforms of hate speech and disinformation, the EU has adopted a severe position. Last month, it formally requested information from X regarding its handling of violent terrorist content, hate speech, and misinformation pertaining to the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Since the conflict, X has not been the only one to deal with objectionable content.
After users on the platform uploaded videos that were sympathetic to Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter that justified the terrorist attacks against Americans on 9/11 and criticized US backing for Israel, TikTok banned the hashtag #lettertoamerica on Thursday. The news website Guardian, which had published the letter’s transcript that was going viral, removed it and replaced it with a notice pointing readers to a 2002 story that, according to the publication, offered more background.
X users who were critical of TikTok which is controlled by Beijing-based ByteDance, took notice of the videos. TikTok claimed that the letter was not a trend on its app and attributed the increased interaction to the hashtag to media attention and an X post by journalist Yashar Ali.
Republicans and other critics of the short-form video app claim that it has not shielded Jewish users from harassment and has been inadvertently promoting pro-Palestinian content to users.
TikTok has vehemently retaliated, claiming that it removes antisemitic information and does not bias its algorithm.
