Brands suspend advertising on X after ads appear alongside Nazi content
Another advertiser claimed it hasn't runs a paid ad campaign on X in years, regardless of X serving its ads to users.
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?
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.)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Exactly! That's exactly how it feels!
Musk has continued to place his personal proclivity for right-wing content and influencers over brand โ and really overall user โ 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.
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?
woke mind wizards
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.
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?
They want the negative reaction. They thrive on being hated. Similar with some of the worst Internet trolls. The hatred validates them.
Wouldnโt it be better to advocate their ideas without explicitly associating yourself with them, just to avoid the (completely justified) knee-jerk reaction?
I don't think raising swastika flags counts as "without explicitly associating yourself with them".
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.
Just love how we all refer to it as "the company formerly known as Twitter"
Feels like "the artist formerly known as Prince"
It may have been implied.
Huh? That's quite a leap, don't you think? /s
Just keep calling it Twitter without acknowledging the name change. It'll piss him off even more.
It's still hosted on twitter.com, so idk what the deal is.
How to kill a company in 3 easy steps
Feels more like a 300 cuts
How to kill a company in 300 easy cuts
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?
Itโs amazing there are still so many brands and social media strategists who seem in denial about whatโs 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
That's what happens when you hang out at a Nazi bar...
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 Marylandโs 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.
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.
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.
I'm surprised it took this long.
Can't even block nazis.
Couldn't block them in real life in the 30s and 40s, so he's just being true to history.
If you're advertising on Twitter in 2023 and your target audience isn't Nazis, what are you doing? ๐
And no one but Musk is the least bit surprised by the catastrophic failure of Twitter.
It's about damn time!
Does anybody else have a feeling like itโs a New Coke situation?
Drive it into the ground, then a year later come back with a shadow CEO and say โWeโre back and better than everโโฆprofit.
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.
How is that supposed to work?
Get people to start missing it like Twinkies.
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.
I am still entirely convinced that the only reason he bought Twitter in the first place is because of this: https://www.businessinsider.com/student-who-tracks-elon-musk-jet-launching-own-website-2023-2
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.
He didn't want any of that.
He wants free speech only if he agrees with it.
But but but there were good people on both sides Disney!
Bwahahaha between x and trump Iโm entertained.
chefโs kiss
Geez, that's pretty fucking intense.
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".