IBM said it was pulling its adds from X formerly Twitter after controversial comments made by X owner Elon Musk and after the British Financial Times reported that the tech giant's ads appeared next to posts supporting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
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“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 emailed to MarketWatch.
Musk on Wednesday agreed with an antisemitic conspiracy theory posted on his platform, that Jewish people hold a “dialectical hatred” of white people. “You have said the actual truth,” Musk wrote in response to the post.
He also claimed that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) “unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel.”
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Sara and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet with Elon Musk earlier this year
(Photo: GPO)
A Media Matters study also found ads from Apple, Oracle and Comcast Corp.’s Xfinity and Bravo were also adjacent to pro-Nazi content.
Musk's antisemitic stand may also effect more of his businesses. " Investment adviser Ross Gerber said Musk was hurting his brand. "I’m not going to mince words about it anymore as a shareholder. It’s absolutely outrageous, his behavior and the damage he’s caused to the brand.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a post that the platform's position is that discrimination was wrong. “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.”