According to news on November 23, X (formerly known as Twitter) began to experience a new wave of advertiser losses last week due to concerns about hate speech on Elon Musk’s social media platform. Since then, at least 12 major brands have halted ad spending on X. Fox Sports, Ubisoft, Axios, TechCrunch and 11:11 Media, the new media company owned by Paris Hilton, have all said in recent days that they have paused ad spending on X. Last week, a number of major advertisers also abandoned the X platform.
The continued withdrawal of advertisers signals a deepening crisis facing X. The company is already working to attract brands back to the platform after Musk completed the acquisition last year. At the same time, more and more X users are turning to other platforms. The White House joined Threads this week.
The latest wave of advertiser losses began last week, when IBM said it had suspended advertising on X after a report from progressive media watchdog MediaMatters found its ads appeared alongside pro-Nazi content on X. IBM's decision follows Musk's public support for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in a post on X earlier this week.
On Friday, a slew of major media brands, including Disney, Paramount, Comcast, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal and CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery Channel, followed suit, although they gave no reasons for halting advertising on X. Apple also withdrew its advertising spending on X last week, according to multiple news outlets.
X called on its advertising partners to help protect what it called "free speech." The company filed a lawsuit on Monday accusing MediaMatters of misrepresenting the likelihood that ads on the site would appear alongside extremist content. X also said it has excluded accounts identified by MediaMatters as pro-Nazi from its monetization strategy, meaning ads can no longer run on those accounts’ pages.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino has been touting brand safety controls, saying they help prevent ads from appearing next to objectionable content. MediaMatters stated that it would litigate with X to the end and insisted on its reporting.
X has taken few additional steps to reassure advertisers that its platform is safe. The pro-Nazi accounts discovered by MediaMatters and other far-right and white supremacist accounts remain active on the site, some of which have been reinstated since Musk took over. CNN on Wednesday discovered that University of Michigan ads appeared on the X account page of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Despite hate speech concerns, some advertisers are staying on X. The NFL, one of the platform's largest advertising partners, said on Tuesday that while it had not pulled funding from the platform, it had raised concerns about hate speech directly to X leadership on multiple occasions. (little)