Disney, Apple, and more suspend Twitter ads amid Elon Musk antisemitism scandal
Lionsgate, among other companies, called out Musk for "antisemitic" comments while announcing they were suspending ads on the platform
Several of the biggest companies on the planet—including Disney and Apple, plus Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes studio Lionsgate—have suspended ads on the social networking service we’ll just go ahead and keep calling Twitter today. This comes after the company’s owner, Elon Musk, made a post on Wednesday in which he wrote “You have said the absolute truth” in response to someone on the platform writing that “Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
Lionsgate explicitly called out the post as “antisemitic” while announcing the decision to pull ads, while Disney and other companies simply halted their spending in the aftermath of the post. Musk, meanwhile, has done as Elon Musk does, i.e., posting through the pain: In the hours since news of the ad suspensions broke, he has spent his time a) posting a GIF of a Diablo game, b) complaining that the mass media is only picking on him because they’re scared of him, and c) writing that “At risk of stating the obvious, anyone advocating the genocide of *any* group will be suspended from this platform,” which is the kind of statement that generates a lot of questions already answered by the metaphorical shirt.
In addition to Musk’s comments, advertisers were apparently also concerned by a report from Media Matters this week alleging that ads for major companies were running alongside antisemitic content. All told, the list of groups pulling ads from Twitter includes Disney, Apple, the European Commission, Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery, and IBM (who got special attention from Musk, who highlighted an Atlantic article about the company’s historical ties to the Nazi regime). The White House also issued a statement targeting Twitter today, saying that, “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.”
Twitter (okay, X) CEO Linda Yaccarino, in her unofficial role as the person doomed to try to make Musk’s impulse decisions palatable to non-deranged humans, issued her own statement today, writing that “X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board — I think that’s something we can and should all agree on. When it comes to this platform — X has also 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.”