South Korea’s Hyundai said on Friday that it had paused advertising on X(formerly known as Twitter) and is speaking to the Elon Musk-owned social media platform directly about brand safety issues.
It was not immediately clear why the auto giant had paused the advertisements on the site. Meanwhile, X did not immediately respond to any repetitive requests for comment from the media.
Last November, the White House condemned Musk’s endorsement of what it called a “hideous” antisemitic conspiracy theory on X, while major companies such as Walt Disney (DIS.N), tab, Warner Bros Discovery (WBD.O), and NBCUniversal parent Comcast (CMCSA.O), paused their advertisements on his social media site.
Reportedly advertisers have fled the site ever since Musk acquired it in October 2022 and reduced content moderation, resulting in a sharp rise in hate speech on X, according to civil rights groups.
Nancy Levine Stearns, a freelance journalist and X user,
posted a screenshot Wednesday of a Hyundai ad running on an X account that often posts Holocaust denial and antisemitism. Stearns has written about brand safety on X for Hill Reporter, a progressive news site.
Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, confirmed the Hyundai pause in an email Thursday in response to questions. He said X was working with Hyundai’s marketers to put in place further brand safety controls.
Benarroch also said a Holocaust-denial post that appeared adjacent to a Hyundai ad would get a label as violating X’s policy on “violent event denial.” Hyundai is the world’s third-largest automaker by sales volume, after Toyota and Volkswagen. Its headquarters are in South Korea, and its brands include Kia.
The account for months has had a blue checkmark signaling that it is a paid “Premium” subscriber. This month, X began giving blue checkmarks to some unpaid users with more than 2,500 verified followers, making it more difficult to determine who is a paid subscriber, but the account in question has had its blue checkmark for longer.
Media watchdog Media Matters has previously found that corporate advertisements by IBM (IBM.N), Apple , Oracle (ORCL.N), and Comcast’s Xfinity were being placed alongside antisemitic content.