Global tech company IBM announced on Thursday that they will stop advertising on X, formerly known as Twitter, after its ads were found to have appeared alongside pro-Nazi tweets on the social platform owned by Elon Musk.
IBM’s decision to halt advertising was made the day after Musk expressed his approval with an antisemitic conspiracy theory on the website.
Musk was responding to a user on X who said that Jews were to blame for the surge in online antisemitism because they supported “hordes of minorities” and encouraged “hatred against Whites.” The individual expressed their lack of empathy for Jews who encounter harsh remarks like “Hitler was right.”
“The 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.” — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2023
Musk amplified the user’s post to his enormous online following by responding, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk continued his criticism of the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that fights extremism and antisemitism, in a later tweet, claiming that the organisation “unjustly attacks the majority of the West” for spreading anti-Semitic sentiment instead of focusing on “the minority groups who are their primary threat.”
X has lost droves of advertisers and users
It’s not just advertisers that X has lost. According to web traffic tracking company SimilarWeb, X lost more than half a billion visits worldwide in September alone. In more than 140 of the 176 countries where the site was operational, there was a fall in users.
In another effort to bolster revenue streams, X is also reportedly testing a new subscription service that can restrict the amount of adverts that are seen by users. According to Bloomberg, in a meeting with X’s creditors, CEO Linda Yaccarino stated that the business would launch three membership tiers for users, allowing it to make more money from customers who were not likely to pay the full cost of the premium subscription.
Since acquiring Twitter in October 2022, a number of the changes that Musk has made have drawn criticism from the platforms users, including the decision to abandon its previous method of verifying well-known individuals in favour of a subscription-based service. Moreover, Musk undid the company’s policies against spreading false information about COVID-19, restored the accounts of users who had previously been banned, and dismantled the teams in charge of policing the site to remove harmful content.