• by Wayne Friedman , November 17, 2023

Media, entertainment and other marketers have pulled advertising from X/Twitter in the wake of remarks made by Elon Musk, owner and chief technology officer of X.

Lionsgate and IBM paused their respective advertising plans from the platform.

A Lionsgate representative confirmed to MediaPost that the TV and movie studio has suspended advertising on the site. Earlier this week, IBM said it stopped advertising on X after a report said its ads were appearing alongside material praising Nazis.

Late on Friday, Axios reported Apple had suspended X advertising due to Musk's response to an X user's post. Then The New York Times reported Walt Disney was also suspending advertising on X. 

A Disney representative had no comment in response to a MediaPost inquiry about the move. Apple representatives had not returned messages from MediaPost at presstime.

Representatives from Comcast's NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount Global also confirmed to MediaPost they also were pausing their respective advertising schedules on X.

The move to pull advertising was made in response to Elon Musk's response to an X user’s post about being “disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations” and that those “flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”

Musk’s response to this post was: “You have said the actual truth.” That post has amassed 6.6 million views on X.

The complete X user post was as follows: “Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”

It went on to say: “I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit 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 too much.”

Just a day earlier, IBM said it would suspend all its advertising on the site -- after the company confirmed that its ads had appeared alongside material praising Nazis.

On Thursday, Media Matters for America, an advocacy group, said ads for Apple, Oracle, Comcast, and NBCUniversal’s Bravo network were placed next to antisemitic material on X.

In addition, the European Union’s executive branch said it is stopping advertising on X and other social-media platforms, partly because of a surge in hate speech.

Last month, Insider Intelligence estimated X will drop 54% to $1.89 billion in advertising revenue for all of 2023 -- after a year of Musk controlling ownership of the platform. In 2022, advertising revenue was $4.12 billion. 

This decline comes in response to accounts spreading misinformation, according to analysts -- as well as the company laying off a majority of its workforce — engineers as moderators who keep it from being overrun with hate.

This story has been updated.