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.
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?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
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.
