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?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
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.
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%?
I just cannot believe anyone at all still uses Twitter. There’s an amazing self hosted alternative
You just cannot believe that the majority of the world isn’t capable of - let alone interested in - self hosting a Mastodon server?
So make an account on one of the many instances. The point is it’s open source and free. How many brain cells do you have bro
You do not understand the brand recognition. No one knows what Mastodon is. Tech bros and maybe a small precent of aware people. But I bet you if you went to a grocery store and asked everyone throughout the day to identify Twitter or Mastodon and all those others, Twitter’s recognition demolishes every other platform.
self hosted alternative
We’ll, that takes care of the 1% of people who have the technical knowledge and interest. How do you recommend handling the other 99%?
Pause for the accolades, restart for the dollars.
Apple aren’t serious about snubbing Musk and Twitter until they Suspend the App from the App Store.
I’m sure their marketing, legal and AppStore teams can find some way that it has violated App Store rules that isn’t going to cause a terrible precedent.
Yes. They did change that specific rule to accomodate Musks vanity.
They were still advertising on Twitter at the time so there is that.
Hopefully the next time Twitter does something stupid (like continued patronage by Nazis and people pretending to be Nazis for the LOLZ).
