Twitter has been found running adverts for companies such as The Wall Street Journal, Nokia, and Mailchimp in the reply threads of documented Holocaust deniers.
While not only proving exceptionally brand unsafe for these advertisers, the evidence presents another problem — Musk has said that Twitter will rollout a revenue-sharing model for adverts in the reply threads of users subscribed to Twitter Blue.
Media Matters for America, a not-for-profit research and information centre, saw the ads underneath tweets from, and in the reply threads of some heinous accounts.
E. Michael Jones, for example, is a Holocaust denier who routinely attacks Jewish people and claimed that the “Holocaust narrative” was created to help Jewish people impose their views on America. Here is one of the adverts featured with his tweets.
To be eligible, the account must be a subscriber to Twitter Blue Verified
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2023
Media Matters has a host of other examples, including ads running alongside tweets from British Neo-Nazi Mark Collett and Swedish far-right commentators Lana Lokteff and Henrik Palmgren, the former believing that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were used for delousing clothing or as bomb shelters.
It has also run ads next to tweets from the The Institute for Historical Review, which the Southern Poverty Law Centre described as “a pseudo-academic organization that claims to seek ‘truth and accuracy in history,’ but whose real purpose is to promote Holocaust denial and defend Nazism.”
Read the article by Tom Fogden in B&T.