Apple, Disney and IBM to pause ads on X after antisemitic Elon Musk tweet

News@lemmy.world – 323 points – 1 years ago

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.

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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:

Of course, not everyone agrees with Seltzer's assessment — least of all IBM. Last week, the company released a statement: "If this book points to new and verifiable information that advances understanding of this tragic era, IBM will examine it and ask that appropriate scholars do the same." But company spokespeople insist that Black's allegations are not new, that historians have long been aware that the Nazis used IBM's tabulating machines. And, spokespeople insist, the company is paying for its mistakes: IBM Germany, formerly Dehomag, has already paid into Germany's government-sponsored initiative to compensate citizens forced to work for the Nazis.

I thought there was a lot more public acknowledgement though, and it's hard to find. So - 50%?

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