Apple on Friday suspended its promoting on Elon Musk’s X social media platform after a report found that its ads were placed alongside far-right content.
The iPhone maker’s decision to pause ads, which was first reported by the news site Axios, is the most recent blow for X, the social media app formerly often called Twitter.
Entertainment giant Disney and film company Lionsgate joined Apple in pulling its ads from the location — a day after IBM cut ties with Musk’s embattled platform.
Apple had been on track to spend $180 million on X last yr, the Recent York Times reported.
The Post has sought comment from Apple and X.
Earlier within the day, Musk drew the condemnation of the White House for his “abhorrent promotion” of a “hideous lie” which claimed that Jews supported “hordes of minorities” immigrating to the US.
Musk wrote Wednesday on X to a different user of the platform, “You have got said the actual truth” — after that user, who has few followers and doesn’t use their name of their profile, pushed an antisemitc trope about Jews.
“Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing … dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” the user with whom Musk agreed wrote.
“I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s— now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them an excessive amount of. You wish truth said to your face, there it’s.”
In one other tweet in the identical thread, Musk added: “The [Anti-Defamation League] unjustly attacks nearly all of the West, despite nearly all of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. It’s because they can not, by their very own tenets, criticize the minority groups who’re their primary threat. It is just not right and wishes to stop.”
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said the owner of X, SpaceX and Tesla promoted the identical claim that propelled murderer Robert Bowers to kill 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.
“It’s unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind essentially the most fatal act of Antisemitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people because the Holocaust,” Bates said.
IBM said on Thursday that it was halting ads on X after a report by the Democratic Party-aligned watchdog group Media Matters issued a report which found that the corporate’s ads were placed next to content promoting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
“IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and now we have immediately suspended all promoting on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” the corporate said in a press release.
X said its system doesn’t intentionally place brands “actively next to this sort of content,” and the content cited by Media Matters would not find a way to generate profits off its posts.
Scores of Jewish officials including activists and rabbis demanded that Apple, Google, Amazon, and Disney halt ads on X.
The Jewish leaders circulated a petition demanding that Google and Apple remove X from their app stores.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted a press release on Thursday saying the corporate has been “extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination.”
“There’s no place for it anywhere on the earth — it’s ugly and unsuitable. Full stop,” she wrote.
Advertisers have fled the location since Musk bought it and reduced content moderation, which has resulted in a dramatic increase in hate speech on X, civil rights groups have said.
Reuters reported in October that monthly US ad revenue at X has declined at the very least 55% year-over-year every month since Musk bought the corporate in October 2022, citing third-party data provided to Reuters.
Antisemitism has been on the rise lately in america and worldwide.
Following the outbreak of war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which attacked Israel on Oct. 7, antisemitic incidents in america rose by nearly 400% from the year-earlier period, the ADL said.
With Post Wires