Apple will pause all its advertising on X, formerly Twitter, two days after owner Elon Musk tweeted his enthusiastic agreement with an antisemitic post.
A cascade of other major technology and media companies, from IBM to Disney, made similar announcements on Friday.
Apple’s ads had run beside tweets praising Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, according to a report released earlier in the week. Film studio Lionsgate said it would also pause ads on X, as did Warner Bros, Paramount, Sony Pictures, and Comcast/NBCUniversal, according to media reports. IBM made a similar move the night prior. The New York Times reported Disney would be pausing spending on the social media platform as well.
The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX wrote Wednesday that a tweet accusing Jews of hating white people was “the actual truth”. The White House condemned Musk’s statements Friday morning, lambasting them as “abhorrent”. A coalition of more than 150 rabbis had called for Apple, Disney, Amazon, Oracle and others to stop advertising on the social network in response to Musk’s tweets.
Honestly, I’m surprised that they are still there.
I’m surprised anyone who isn’t a right-wing nut job is still there.
It’s ridiculous that it took Elon to be totally open about his racism for them to do this. And as the article says, it’s a pause. They’ll start advertising there again when the furor dies down. Then they’ll do another pause the next time he says something atrocious and the cycle will repeat.
I don’t see why these companies are acting surprised when he’s made it clear that he’s a fascist asshole for at least a year straight now.
Money?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
I can’t picture advertising on Twitter being extremely lucrative for large companies currently. Most of them have already reduced their Twitter ad spending by a huge amount compared to last year.
Apple is still happy to sell iPhones to right wing douche nozzles and twitter is a great way to reach them.
I’m sure. But it’s not really who their brand is oriented towards or does best with, and they can easily continue to thrive without advertising on TwitX.
You missed an opportunity to put Fuhrer instead of furor but I’ll forgive you.
The space development tracking community and Ukraine war OSINT people basically only use Twitter. I am interested in both topics so I use Twitter, but specifically only for those topics.
Fair. My comment may have been harsh. Hopefully some new and better alternatives become more adopted soon.
Well I’m surprised IBM is shying away from their past. I feel like they want to make their products available to Nazis
What’s weird is I just got done reading about this very thing and the fact they refuse to admit they did anything wrong.
They’ve admitted it a lot. Where are you getting that disinformation?Well trying to find an actual statement is more difficult than I remember, but that could partially be due to Google ongoing enshittification. I did find this in a TIME article about the “IBM and the Holocaust” book from 2001:
Of course, not everyone agrees with Seltzer’s assessment — least of all IBM. Last week, the company released a statement: “If this book points to new and verifiable information that advances understanding of this tragic era, IBM will examine it and ask that appropriate scholars do the same.” But company spokespeople insist that Black’s allegations are not new, that historians have long been aware that the Nazis used IBM’s tabulating machines. And, spokespeople insist, the company is paying for its mistakes: IBM Germany, formerly Dehomag, has already paid into Germany’s government-sponsored initiative to compensate citizens forced to work for the Nazis.
I thought there was a lot more public acknowledgement though, and it’s hard to find. So - 50%?
They have been complicit in maintaining the platform
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Just curious - what hobby needs twitter? Can it migrate to mastodon?
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I just cannot believe anyone at all still uses Twitter. There’s an amazing self hosted alternative
You just cannot believe that the majority of the world isn’t capable of - let alone interested in - self hosting a Mastodon server?
So make an account on one of the many instances. The point is it’s open source and free. How many brain cells do you have bro
Twitter was the best at what it did up until recently and Mastodon has a fraction of the users and you expect the layman to know enough about it to switch? How stuck in your echo chamber are you bro
You do not understand the brand recognition. No one knows what Mastodon is. Tech bros and maybe a small precent of aware people. But I bet you if you went to a grocery store and asked everyone throughout the day to identify Twitter or Mastodon and all those others, Twitter’s recognition demolishes every other platform.
self hosted alternative
We’ll, that takes care of the 1% of people who have the technical knowledge and interest. How do you recommend handling the other 99%?
Make an account on masadon.social or one of the many other instances. Like what?
I keep my account active only so that some Nazi does gobble up my screen name.
I don’t really check it, but I’ll go and quickly make a little post every couple months to keep it “active” in case they start deleting “old” accounts.
Pause for the accolades, restart for the dollars.
Why would Apple bother resuming? It’s dying, shit platform that is like #10 globally now.
“Pause”? This is temporary. Big companies like these are fine with supporting right-wing shitbags, even when the right is calling for extermination of innocent people. They just don’t want to be labelled antisimetic if it could affect sales. They’ll be back on Twitter in a couple months, when their names aren’t in the news cycle anymore.
IBM, also one of X’s biggest advertisers, announced it would stop advertising on X Thursday. The company made the decision in response to a report by liberal watchdog Media Matters that found both IBM and Apple’s ads running alongside hate speech. Musk called Media Matters an “evil organization” in response.
Whoever’s job it is to keep a dart gun trained on him, you might want to make sure it’s loaded. Dude’s crackin’.
You know what’s anti-semitic if DISNEY pulls ads…
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Apple aren’t serious about snubbing Musk and Twitter until they Suspend the App from the App Store.
I’m sure their marketing, legal and AppStore teams can find some way that it has violated App Store rules that isn’t going to cause a terrible precedent.
Didnt x already violate the app store rules because of the name?
Yes. They did change that specific rule to accomodate Musks vanity.
They were still advertising on Twitter at the time so there is that.
Hopefully the next time Twitter does something stupid (like continued patronage by Nazis and people pretending to be Nazis for the LOLZ).
It’s there to destroy for him. It ist a billionaire tech it’s about silence the greater public.
Elon bro, never go full Ye…
Elon Musk tweeted his enthusiastic agreement with an antisemitic post.
So, what was the stupid post anyway ? (Hope it was not a simple pro Palestine post). I know the guy is crazy but if we accuse him of something let’s say what exactly is the accusation.
Looks like it was this
