Posted on November 17, 2023

IBM Pulls X Ads as Elon Musk Endorses White Pride

Jacob Kastrenakes, The Verge, November 16, 2023

IBM has pulled its advertising presence from X, formerly Twitter, as Elon Musk continues to endorse far-right talking points — agreeing with posts this week that promoted antisemitism and pushed support for white pride. The nonprofit Media Matters drew attention to those statements and noted that IBM, Apple, Comcast, and other companies all had ads placed next to pro-Nazi and pro-Hitler content (not posted by Musk) on X. IBM told the Financial Times and confirmed to The Verge that “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.”

On the platform today, Musk called it “super messed up” that white people are not, in the words of one far-right poster’s tweet, “allowed to be proud of their race.” The white pride support came a day after Musk agreed with an antisemitic post claiming that Jewish communities have stoked “hatred against whites.” {snip}

Musk later focused in on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a nonprofit focused on fighting antisemitism, saying that the group “unjustly attacks the majority of the West” (a category Musk left undefined) because it cannot “criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat.” {snip}

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