Apple, Disney and IBM to pause ads on X after antisemitic Elon Musk tweet
Apple will pause all its advertising on X, formerly Twitter, two days after owner Elon Musk tweeted his enthusiastic agreement with an antisemitic post.
A cascade of other major technology and media companies, from IBM to Disney, made similar announcements on Friday.
Apple’s ads had run beside tweets praising Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, according to a report released earlier in the week. Film studio Lionsgate said it would also pause ads on X, as did Warner Bros, Paramount, Sony Pictures, and Comcast/NBCUniversal, according to media reports. IBM made a similar move the night prior. The New York Times reported Disney would be pausing spending on the social media platform as well.
The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX wrote Wednesday that a tweet accusing Jews of hating white people was “the actual truth”. The White House condemned Musk’s statements Friday morning, lambasting them as “abhorrent”. A coalition of more than 150 rabbis had called for Apple, Disney, Amazon, Oracle and others to stop advertising on the social network in response to Musk’s tweets.
Honestly, I'm surprised that they are still there.
I'm surprised anyone who isn't a right-wing nut job is still there.
It's ridiculous that it took Elon to be totally open about his racism for them to do this. And as the article says, it's a pause. They'll start advertising there again when the furor dies down. Then they'll do another pause the next time he says something atrocious and the cycle will repeat.
I don't see why these companies are acting surprised when he's made it clear that he's a fascist asshole for at least a year straight now.
Money?
I can’t picture advertising on Twitter being extremely lucrative for large companies currently. Most of them have already reduced their Twitter ad spending by a huge amount compared to last year.
Apple is still happy to sell iPhones to right wing douche nozzles and twitter is a great way to reach them.
I'm sure. But it's not really who their brand is oriented towards or does best with, and they can easily continue to thrive without advertising on TwitX.
You missed an opportunity to put Fuhrer instead of furor but I'll forgive you.
The space development tracking community and Ukraine war OSINT people basically only use Twitter. I am interested in both topics so I use Twitter, but specifically only for those topics.
Fair. My comment may have been harsh. Hopefully some new and better alternatives become more adopted soon.
Well I'm surprised IBM is shying away from their past. I feel like they want to make their products available to Nazis
What's weird is I just got done reading about this very thing and the fact they refuse to admit they did anything wrong.
They've admitted it a lot. Where are you getting that disinformation?Well trying to find an actual statement is more difficult than I remember, but that could partially be due to Google ongoing enshittification. I did find this in a TIME article about the "IBM and the Holocaust" book from 2001:
I thought there was a lot more public acknowledgement though, and it's hard to find. So - 50%?