At least two brands have said they will suspend advertising on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, after their ads and those of other companies were run on an account promoting fascism. The issue came less than a week after X CEO Linda Yaccarino publicly affirmed the company’s commitment to b...
Free speech is good and must be protected, that's clear. But it should not be virtually limitless. The US played a major role sorting out the negative consequences of the Weimar republic, which did not contain fascist ideology, which then (edit: among other things ofc) lead to WW2.
It still baffles my mind how the US cannot see that tolerating the intolerant must inevitably lead to an intolerant and possibly facist society.
Spokespeople for NCTA and pharmaceutical company Gilead said that they immediately paused their ad spending on X after CNN flagged their ads on the pro-Nazi account.
Alt-speak: we only care if the media report that our ad placements were next to questionable contents.
Why do people assume that brands explicitly endorse everything their ads run next to? Do they think companies are purposely seeking out these bad people to run their ads next to? I never got the whole not wanting your ads next to questionable content thing.
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The issue came less than a week after X CEO Linda Yaccarino publicly affirmed the company’s commitment to brand safety for advertisers.
The nonprofit news watchdog Media Matters for America documented in a report published Wednesday that ads for a host of mainstream brands have been run on the account, which has shared content celebrating Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Ads for brands including Adobe, Gilead Sciences, the University of Maryland’s football team, New York University Langone Hospital and NCTA-The Internet and Television Association were run alongside tweets from the account that had garnered hundreds of thousands of views, CNN observed.
But Wednesday’s report suggests that the company still has work to do if it wants to avoid monetizing, and placing ads alongside, objectionable content.
“Media Matters and other observers have documented how X has remained a dangerous cesspool of content, especially for advertisers,” Wednesday’s report states.
Media Matters says it has also documented instances of brands’ ads being placed next to content from Holocaust denial and white nationalist accounts.