Big global brands are pulling out from advertising on X after a media report charged the platform with promoting pro-Nazi content, an accusation which 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 press briefing on Friday, Johannes Bahrke, a spokesperson for the European Commission, stated that the group is freezing adverts 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.”
The ad pullout follows the release of a report by left-wing media watchdog Media Matters for America which claimed that X was placing adverts of Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), Oracle, Xfinity (Comcast), and IBM “next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party.”
Corporate ads were appearing on “pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence, and neo-Nazi accounts,” it said while posting screenshots of such ad placements.
Media Matters has published a list of companies that have pulled out advertisements from X following its report.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, slammed Media Matters for its report. “The split second court opens on Monday; X Corp. will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company,” he said in a Nov. 18 X post.
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 [that] 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 is not “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 Matter’s 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.”
The executive asked for three pieces of information from Media Matters—the user handle, the date, and the time when the organization took the screenshots.
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 believes that “everyone has the right to make up their own minds about what to read, watch, or listen to.”
Despite the “clear and consistent position,” X has been attacked by several legacy media outlets and activist groups like Media Matters, which seek to “undermine freedom of expression on our platform because they perceive it as a threat to their ideological narrative and those of their financial supporters.”
Such groups are trying to utilize their influence to attack X’s revenue streams by “deceiving advertisers,” the statement said.
Talking about Media Matters’ report, X pointed out that the organization “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 only shown adjacent to the post two times and that only two individuals, 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 17 years of Twitter.
“So far this year, 99 percent of measured ad placements have appeared adjacent to content scoring above the brand safety ‘floor’ criteria set by GARM, per 3rd party data,” the executive stated. GARM refers to the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.
Musk and Anti-Semitic Charge
The exodus of big brands from X comes as Mr. Musk is also attracting criticism for allegedly passing anti-Semitic statements. In a comment, Mr. Musk agreed to 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 like Jewish advocacy Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
He insisted that ADL “unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. 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.”
Responding to Mr. Musk’s comments on the controversial post, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of ADL, said in a Nov. 16 X post: “At a time when anti-Semitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote anti-Semitic theories.”
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,” said White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, according to Axios.
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, said in a Nov. 17 X post that the platform’s point of view “has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board—I think that’s something we can and should all agree on.”
“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.”
Speaking to Variety, a Lionsgate spokesperson cited Mr. Musk’s “recent anti-Semitic tweet” as a reason for suspending advertisements on the platform.
Meanwhile, Mr. Musk pointed out in a Nov. 18 post that “many of the largest advertisers are the greatest oppressors of your right to free speech.”
From The Epoch Times
