Prominent brands halted their advertising on X on Friday after Elon Musk’s apparent support of a white supremacist antisemitic conspiracy theory, according to CNN.
Advertisers include Disney, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Comcast, Lionsgate, Warner Bros and Discovery, the parent of CNN. It has also been reported that X has lost Apple.
IBM demanded a pause on its advertising on X, as IBM’s ads were appearing alongside pro-Nazi content. IBM said that it has: ‘zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation’.
“IBM and the Holocaust” by Edwin Black (published in 2001 with an expanded edition in 2021) described the key role that IBM’s technology played in the Holocaust. IBM facilitated the regime’s generation and tabulation of punch cards for census data, military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity.
Watchdog group Media Matters has found that ads by Apple, Comcast, NBC and Oracle have appeared alongside similar content.
White supremacist online groups have espoused the view that Jews want to bring undocumented minority populations into Western countries to reduce their white majorities. This view was also supported by Robert Bowers, convicted of killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, the deadliest attack against Jews in American history.
Musk said 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. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat’.
‘I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind. I’m sick of it. Stop now’, Musk said.