It's not just advertisers that are moving away from X. In recent days, a number of high-profile brands have not only paused paid marketing campaigns on the embattled Elon Musk-owned social platform, but stopped posting on the platform entirely, going silent on what was once the world's "digital town square."
The main accounts for Disney, Paramount, Lionsgate, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN’s parent company) have not posted on the platform for about 10 days, following Musk’s disturbing endorsement of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory for which he has yet to apologize.
None of the studios responded when reached by CNN for comment. But anonymous people familiar with Paramount and WBD's social media strategies confirmed that this is no coincidence: due to brand safety and other considerations, the two companies have proactively decided to stop publishing information on X under certain accounts.
In some cases, the blocks on X extend beyond these companies' business accounts. For example, the most high-profile accounts affiliated with The Walt Disney Company stopped posting on X, such as @StarWars, @Pixar and @MarvelStudios, which previously posted to millions of fans on the platform multiple times a day. Instead, the brands turned to Meta's rival Threads and began actively posting there.
For example, when The Late Show With Stephen Colbert posted on Threads on Monday that host Stephen Colbert would be off the air this week due to appendicitis. Before Musk endorsed anti-Semitic posts, Colbert's show was primarily active on X, regularly posting videos and other content. Now, the opposite is true.
On Monday, a representative for X did not directly answer questions about the loss of the media giant on the platform during an interview, which must have set off alarm bells within the social media company. The lack of advertising revenue is already embarrassing for the struggling company. It would be even worse if there was also a lack of content, especially the physical content that has helped the platform become a hub for real-time discussion over the years.
Of course, it is possible that these companies will resume publishing content and even advertising on the platform in the future, but this is not the first time that advertisers have collectively fled the platform. But there's a chance it won't happen.
With Musk at the helm of the platform for the foreseeable future, overseeing key decisions that have led to a surge in hate speech (while he himself has contributed to its horrific rhetoric), the risk-reward calculus of whether to partner with the company has plummeted. The situation is not unlike when Tucker Carlson kicked most advertisers out of the 8 p.m. slot for good during his time at Fox News Channel.
If more companies and other big names abandon Musk's platform for other social networks, the allure it once had will disappear, giving ordinary users yet another reason to abandon the troubled platform.
Platformer's Casey Newton said: "Every day more brands are waking up to the fact that Twitter is dead and X is a cesspool. The global online town square is now fragmented across many different platforms, and increasingly the most relevant conversations are happening elsewhere."