Apple suspends ads on X after Elon Musk endorses antisemitic post
By: Ariel Z.
Apple on Friday suspended its advertising on Elon Musk’s X social media platform after a report found that its ads were placed alongside far-right content.
The iPhone maker’s decision to pause ads, which was first reported by the news site Axios, is the latest blow for X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter.
Entertainment giant Disney and film company Lionsgate joined Apple in pulling its ads from the site – a day after IBM cut ties with Musk’s embattled platform.
Apple had been on track to spend $180 million on X last year, the New York Times reported.
Earlier in the day, Musk drew the condemnation of the White House for his “abhorrent promotion” of a “hideous lie” which claimed that Jews supported “hordes of minorities” immigrating to the US.
Musk wrote Wednesday on X to another user of the platform, “You have said the actual truth” – after that user, who has few followers and doesn’t use their name in their profile, pushed an antisemitc trope about Jews.
“Jewish communties have been pushing.. dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” the user with whom Musk agreed wrote.
“I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s – 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. You want truth said to your face, there it is.”
In another tweet in the same thread, Musk added: “The [Anti-Defamation League] unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop.”
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said the owner of X, SpaceX and Tesla promoted the same claim that propelled murderer Robert Bowers to kill 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.
“It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of Antisemitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Bates said.
IBM said on Thursday that it was halting ads on X after a report by the Democratic Party-aligned watchdog group Media Matters issued a report which found that the company’s ads were placed next to content promoting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
“IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” the company said in a statement.
X said its system does not intentionally place brands “actively next to this kind of content,” and the content cited by Media Matters would no longer be able to make money off its posts.
Scores of Jewish officials including activists and rabbis demanded that Apple, Google, Amazon, and Disney halt ads on X.
The Jewish leaders circulated a petition demanding that Google and Apple remove X from their app stores.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted a statement on Thursday saying the company has been “extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination.”
“There’s no place for it anywhere in the world – it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop,” she wrote.
Advertisers have fled the site since Musk bought it and reduced content moderation, which has resulted in a dramatic increase in hate speech on X, civil rights groups have said.
Reuters reported in October that monthly US ad revenue at X has declined at least 55% year-over-year each month since Musk bought the company in October 2022, citing third-party data provided to Reuters.
Antisemitism has been on the rise in recent years in the United States and worldwide.
Following the outbreak of war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which attacked Israel on Oct. 7, antisemitic incidents in the United States rose by nearly 400% from the year-earlier period, the ADL said.
