• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 13, 2024

The ad industry's Trustworthy Accountability Group has restored X's “brand safety” certification -- a seal of approval meant to reassure advertisers that their ads won't appear adjacent to inappropriate content.

X (formerly Twitter) announced the recertification on Thursday, tweeting that it has “deployed every single brand control the marketplace has requested over the past 12 months.”

The company added: “In just one year, our team of engineers built all-new Brand Adjacency Controls and Sensitivity Settings, and established third-party measurement partnerships.”

News of the recertification comes around two months after metrics company DoubleVerify said X's brand-safety rating between October 2023 and March 2024 was actually 99.9%, instead of previously reported lower scores.

The watchdog Check My Ads, which publicly questioned X's certification last year, blasted the Trustworthy Accountability Group's decision to restore the seal.

“Anyone who logs into X can readily observe that X continues to be overrun with hate,” Check My Ads stated Thursday.

Last September, Check My Ads alleged in a post on its site that X ran afoul of the ad organization's certification requirements in several ways, including by failing to have a designated brand-safety officer, failing to conduct internal audits.

The watchdog also alleged in a complaint filed with the Trustworthy Accountability Group that X allowed ads adjacent to objectionable content.

The Trustworthy Accountability Group says in its brand safety guidelines that companies must have a “content taxonomy for defining and avoiding harmful content” -- including sexually explicit material, weapons, piracy, hate speech and illegal drugs.

By March, the Trustworthy Accountability Group had removed X from its roster of companies certified for brand safety.

Separately, a different watchdog, Media Matters, reported last year that ads for brands including Apple, Bravo, IBM and Oracle were being placed next to pro-Nazi posts on X.

After that report came out, Apple, IBM, Comcast and other companies suspended advertising on the platform.

The Trustworthy Accountability Group didn't respond Thursday to MediaPost's requests for comment.