As more than 200 companies and institutions stopped advertising due to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s successive moves to support the “anti-Semitic” conspiracy theory, his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) will lose up to $75 million by the end of the year.
The New York Times reported on the 25th (local time) that after analyzing internal documents of the X sales team, major companies such as Airbnb, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Netflix have either stopped or are considering suspending advertisements for X. The three months, the last quarter of the year in the United States, are a time when media advertisements are concentrated because shopping events such as Christmas and Black Friday are concentrated following Thanksgiving, the NYT pointed out. In this regard, X explained that advertising revenue at risk of loss is only around $11 million, and the figures mentioned in the document are internal expressions to assess the overall risk.
Advertising revenue was already down nearly 60% from last year due to controversy over an increase in hate speech within X after Musk took over Twitter for $44 billion in October last year. As a result, Musk stepped down from the management front in May this year, recruiting Linda Yakarino, who was NBC Universal’s advertising manager, as CEO X to make a reform, and advertisers seemed to be returning.
However, following Musk’s recent posting in support of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, a media watchdog group’s report that major corporate advertisements were placed next to Nazi-backed content in X began to leave advertisers again. In particular, on the 15th of this month, Musk posted a comment agreeing with the conspiracy theory that Jews supported immigration of minorities and encouraged hatred of white people to replace the white population, saying it was “actual truth,” and even the White House issued a statement criticizing it as “unacceptable.”
Mindful of this, Musk said on the 21st that he would donate all of X’s profits from Israel-Hamas war content to hospitals in Israel and the Red Cross in Gaza, citing humanitarianism, but advertisements are not increasing. “Advertisers are looking for alternatives on other platforms such as TikTok, not X,” said Risha Anderson, vice president of digital marketing at the advertising agency Outcast. “Social platform owners should act carefully in expressing their beliefs or political positions.”
TED PARK
US ASIA JOURNAL
