Brands suspend advertising on X after ads appear alongside Nazi content

HLMenckenFan@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1490 points –
Brands suspend advertising on X after ads appear alongside Nazi content
mashable.com
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All these news about X going to shit feels like that gif of the truck driving towards the pole but constantly cutting before the impact

This one?

I watched two ads just to get rickrolled.

Get Sync for Lemmy. Never get rickrolled again!

Sync is nice but I’m on ios. Currently using Avelon and it shows link previews, but only for the site.

It still shocks me every time I encounter people browsing the internet without an ad blocker. Just why?

How would my mom go about easily blocking YouTube ads on her iPhone?

Install AdGuard pro and replace YouTube app with a shortcut to open YouTube in Safari. Adblockers can’t block ads in the app but can in Safari.

She wouldn't, that's why she bought an iPhone, because "it just works!".

So then it really shouldn't be too shocking for the person I replied to.

im presuming not many mothers who dont understand the difference between an app and a webpage are on lemmy.

How dare you. No, this one. (Really, though. It's been a while and I wanted to see it again, happy to be of service.)

Wouldn't it have been amazing if you linked to the same video again to troll everyone, and I comment to confirm that it is the right video while the whole time it is not?

Musk has continued to place his personal proclivity for right-wing content and influencers over brand – and really overall user – safety. For example, last month, Musk personally intervened to restore a right-wing influencer's account after they were suspended for posting photos of child exploitation.

Tells you everything you need to know.

  1. Buy unprofitable application
  2. Make a series of incredibly shit business decisions
  3. It's now less profitable than before.
  4. ???
  5. ???
  6. Profit

Hold on, maybe I've figured it out. Endless magical profits, here I come!

Step 4. Be ultra-wealthy. (Bonus for not paying taxes.) Step 5. Do anything. (Bonus for pretending it's profitable.)

I've one the steps is, "use the letter X SOMEHOW, so people won't laugh at you and will realize you are so cool finally"

Last step is selling it to yahoo!

Nah, it's selling to Yahoo, then getting your parent company acquired by Verizon, then having Verizon spin your parent company off again.

wow everything is a nazi now including hitler

They never give Adolf Hitler credit- he killed Adolf Hitler.

"Everything that I don't like (that is or openly supports a nazi) is now a nazi!"

These days mate, if you're a Nazi, they'll call you a Nazi! Oh no, when did this come in?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvgZtdmyKlI (English subtitles available, 2 funny minutes worth your time)

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=zvgZtdmyKlI

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

Just FYI: I can see the video on YouTube but piped gets stuck at showing the loading animation.

Safari on iOS with NextDNS and an adblocker. My dns settings are pretty unforgiving, but I wouldn’t expect YouTube to pass the checks and piped to fail.

I got curious about just how bad said Nazi content is, and managed to find an article with some screenshots: https://nypost.com/2023/08/17/x-suspends-pro-hitler-account-after-brands-paused-ads/

Spoiler: very Nazi.

So it's not just Nazi-compatible ideas. It's straight out Nazi symbolism.

I really don't get these people - even if you believe the Nazis were right, you know they are the most hated historical faction in the world. Wouldn't it be better to advocate their ideas without explicitly associating yourself with them, just to avoid the (completely justified) knee-jerk reaction?

You're suggesting that Nazi's use their famous critical thinking skills to understand that 99% of the world hates them and their ideology?

Being evil is one thing, but there is no excuse for being stupid.

Has there ever been any intelligent right-wing movements? Pretty much every white supremacist has the IQ of a fairly cool room. They claim to be the superior race, while providing absolutely no evidence of this.

Yes, lots of them. You can't think of them because they got what they wanted without you noticing it.

They want the negative reaction. They thrive on being hated. Similar with some of the worst Internet trolls. The hatred validates them.

Your link just shows the blinking X and "someone 'paused' (e.g stopped) doing business" with "x".

Or am I missing something?

We don't fucking want them on lemmy either

The glory of instances. If enough people dont like it, they can just block it!

It's a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it's easy to block out communities with racist, homophobic, and xenophobic views. On the other hand, it allows communities like that to become echo chambers and freely further their abhorrent ideals completely unchecked.

I don't think the ban hammer is the most effective method of shutting down nazi shit, but it's a hell of a lot better than shutting it out of sight and trying to forget about it.

Problem is that if we don't kick out the Nazis, sooner or later this will become a Nazi bar.

Echo chamber will live no matter what. If they cant do it on reddit, they will do it on someplace else. Blocking them is the best we can do, as long as people that I dislike are still alive and have access to internet.

Moderation is different from censorship.

I am not ever opposed to moderation. If you don't want to see something, you shouldn't have to.

I am opposed to most censorship. People who want to discuss their bad ideas with each other and everyone who wants to read them should be allowed to.

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Lunatics always show up in my For You feed on Twitter. I always tag the company with a screenshot of the offending content with the advertisement. Lately it’s been weird advertisements. Shitty gambling apps, religious and personal accounts promoting their personal brand. So they likely don’t care.

Also I’ll never call Twitter anything but Twitter.

I exclusively am subscribed to porn accounts, so I find it super weird when right ring idiots show up in my feed.

That's what I use Twitter for too but what intrudes my feed is mostly memes and cat videos. While it may be true my experience however isn't that they're pushing right wing content to everyone because I'm not seeing it.

Also I’ll never call Twitter anything but Twitter.

I don't know, I think there's room for appropriate change here;

  • Twater
  • Twit'er
  • Twixlers

I admit, my suggestions could use more help, but surely we must admit they've devolved from Twitter!?

You just accidentally named 3 mastodon instances.

Slap a .moe or .xyz or a .social and you’re federatin baby

Moe moe, kyun~

Sorry, wrong subreddit, err, community.

Just love how we all refer to it as "the company formerly known as Twitter"

Just keep calling it Twitter without acknowledging the name change. It'll piss him off even more.

Can't see any company, let alone something family friendly being remotely okay with any of this. Who wants to pay to be right next to Nazi content besides maybe MyPillow?

It’s amazing there are still so many brands and social media strategists who seem in denial about what’s happening even as they watch their customer engagement on Twitter/X evaporate before their very eyes.

shouldn't have fired the brand safety team

I mean, in all reality, this could be why he fired the brand safety team. He's had aspirations of burying himself with X for decades.

Turns out, money is very much anti-free speech.

I don't think hate speech necessarily falls into the domain of free speech. It falls into the domain of people don't like it so we don't want to be associated with it.

Anyway yet again, free speech only exists between you and the government. If corporations want to disassociate themselves with the business or individual because they allow people to say things they don't like, that's not violation of free speech.

If I have the right of free speech then surely I have the right to decide when, where, and with who my speech is delivered at

Furthermore, one organization that had ads placed on this content claimed that it wasn't an X advertiser at all. In a statement provided to CNN, University of Maryland’s associate athletic director told the outlet that Maryland Football hasn't run a paid ad campaign on X since 2021.

Interesting snippet. It would be very interesting to know how and why that happened.

If a small portion of ads keep repeating, it'd show the shallow pool of advertisers left on the website.

That or there's no one at the helm for advertising.

Either way, looks incredibly shabby.

Are there legal implications for this? Is X guilty of misrepresentation or any such related case.

No idea. It is a kind of defamation but I think you'd struggle to prove it. You could, however, get shedloads of free publicity by banging on about it for clickbait.

That's what happens when you hang out at a Nazi bar...

Is this news to anyone? Elon Musk is a literal Nazi. Every dollar going there supports fascism. I don't get how you can have such a high profile person who is like "Hey, I'm a Nazi, and I sell Nazi shit!" and still be surprised.

I mean, I get that he's a dick, but a nazi? Seriously?

Yes. The Nazis are back

What has he done or said that makes him a "nazi", in your view?

As the old saying goes- If you have 10 people and 1 nazi sitting at a dinner table and willingly eating together, you have 11 Nazis.

He sits at his Twitter dinner table with a lot of Nazis and is absolutely willing to do so.

Does this line of thinking apply to all the other groups also on twitter?

That they're also associating with Nazis? Yes. They need to stop.

Funny. I meant, does this also mean Musk agrees with every single viewpoint expressed on the platform, because he allows their presence?

He doesn't retweet every single viewpoint expressed on the platform.

He does retweet Nazis.

Can you provide even one example?

Despite Musk’s devotion to free speech, he has atoned for some of his mistakes. Fuentes was once again suspended after a few days,

Sounds more like a free speech absolutionist rather than a nazi supporter to me.

This is pretty tenuous evidence to make such a bold claim.

Also, do you think "zuck is a cuck" is an insult exclusive to the far right? And there's nowhere else he could have heard it?

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He's not a Nazi, just someone who allows Nazis on his website, reposts and agrees with their beliefs.

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Any company still advertising on Twitter deserves to be associated with Nazis.

Yea see... they (corporations) prefer their money is made next to white supremacy less loudly. That's all.

That's why they just suspended ads, not terminated ad buying.

If you're advertising on Twitter in 2023 and your target audience isn't Nazis, what are you doing? 😅

This comes as no surprise really. I noticed a marked increase in right wing insanity after Elon took over.

That was always the point. He tried to shame Twitter into giving the far-right a credible platform and in the process, accidentally comitted to buying the site.

Everything else has just been him awkwardly trying to minimise his financial losses and hide that he's actually a dumbfuck.

Wrestle with pigs, get covered in shit, or something like that.

And no one but Musk is the least bit surprised by the catastrophic failure of Twitter.

But but but there were good people on both sides Disney!

He wanted free speech with no censorship. I get it, but he also wants to make a profit. So this is was happens, I hope him and the almighty shareholders are ok with it.

It seems very charitable to say he sincerly cares about free speech given his hindering and sliencing of others.

He never cared about free speech, he only cared about HIS free speech

Well - 79% of 'the almighty shareholders' is Elon Musk, and I somehow get the impression that as long as he is convinced that he's doing exactly the right things nothing will change. The next biggest stakeholders are Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal (5.7%), Oracle founder Larry Ellison (3.0%), Jack Dorsey (3.0%), Sequoia Capital (2.4%), and Vy Capital (2.1%) - and they've all been publicly silent on the topic of twitter self destruction - I think they've transitioned into train-wreck mode where they are in such disbelief about what they are witnessing that they aren't able to articulate opinions about it.

Dorsey agrees with Musk on this stuff. He has said before that he didn't want to ban Trump after J6 and that he was against banning Nazi accounts, but did it because it was a public company, and they kinda had to.

Now he and his buddies are trying to roll out their own social media protocol, bluesky, which is built specifically to not allow Nazis to be banned.

Maybe they are all shorting it big in their alt accounts because they know that the SEC fines will be trivial next to the money they will make. Also, that not a single one of them would see the inside of a court room.

Pretty sure you can't short a private company. It has to be traded on a public exchange to short sell it.

I didn't realize that they delisted it after he bought it.

He wants free speech only if he agrees with it.

Does anybody else have a feeling like it’s a New Coke situation?

Drive it into the ground, then a year later come back with a shadow CEO and say “We’re back and better than ever”…profit.

He's already installed the shadow CEO.

They seriously need to put her face as the last image on the Wikipedia page for sycophant. The pattern is her lagging response with hollow corporate, "girlboss" speak to frame a random 2am gut response from elon as a considered business decision. Her statements to justify his BS are BURSTING with double speak and circular nothingness.

Nope. I think it's a "billionaire who isn't half as smart as he thinks" situation. It's his shoddily built submarine, ready to fail catastrophically at any moment.

After all, has "New Coke" ever worked for a website? Once those users have found somewhere else, they're never coming back.

Get people to start missing it like Twinkies.

Why do brands care so much what their ads appear next to? Its not like people associate the ads with the content.

Years ago I worked for a company that had ads appear on Breitbart. Retargeted display, not a direct buy on the site. People would screenshot the ads and light up our Twitter complaining we were directly supporting hate speech etc, so we asked our demand partner to stop buying there to avoid negative engagement on our social. If your site gets a critical mass of negative attention brands can shut down your ability to be commercially viable, and effectively censor the content in a way.

that's still not "censoring", not even "effectively".

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