Just hours after Elon Musk endorsed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory Wednesday night, new report revealed ads from major companies placed over pro-Nazi content on X, Musk’s platform formerly known as Twitter.
As of Thursday evening, one of those companies, IBM, officially paused all X ads.
“IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination, and we have immediately stopped all X ads while we investigate this completely unacceptable situation,” IBM said in a statement to outlets like Financial Times and On the edge.
On Wednesday, Musk responded to a post by a user spreading the word antisemitic conspiracy theory who argued that Jews were replacing whites with immigrants from minority groups.
“You told the real truth” answered Musk in a post that already has nearly 6 million views on X.
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In subsequent publicationsMusk doubled down, specifically naming organizations like the ADL, which he accused of refusing to “criticize the minority groups that are their primary threat.”
Musk’s handpicked CEO for X, Linda Yaccarino, appeared to address criticism of Musk’s posts in a post Thursday afternoon.
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“X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone has to STOP across the board – I think that’s something we can all agree on,” Iaccarino said. “When it comes to this platform – X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to fight anti-Semitism and discrimination. There is no place for this anywhere in the world – it is ugly and wrong. Period.”
However, just hours before Iaccarino vaguely addressed X’s anti-Semitism, Media Matters For America published a new report found that ads from major companies are appearing in pro-Nazi content on X.
The report found that ads from companies such as IBM, Apple, Oracle, Xfinity and Bravo were placed in content that promoted Nazis and shared positive messages about Hitler. As mentioned earlier, IBM has already announced that it is stopping its advertising campaigns on the platform.
It should be noted that this is far from the first time this has happened. Mashable before that reported in a Media Matters study just a few months ago that found that ads from companies like Amazon, FIFA, Samsung, MLB, Sports Illustrated and Adobe were running alongside pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi X content.
