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Walmart says it is not advertising on social platform X
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Dec 1 (Reuters) - Walmart (WMT.N) said on Friday it is not advertising on social media platform X, one of the latest brands to say it has dropped the Elon Musk-owned site.
The platform has struggled to retain advertisers since Musk acquired the company in October 2022, and faced a fresh exodus in recent weeks over rising concern about antisemitic content.
The user had also referenced the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory, which purports that Jewish people and leftists are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations with non-white immigrants that will lead to a "white genocide."
Musk apologized for his post during an interview at a New York Times DealBook event on Wednesday, but hurled expletives against advertisers that suspended their ads, accusing them of "blackmail."
An executive at a major ad-buying agency, who declined to be named, said X ad sales representatives appeared frustrated in the aftermath of Musk's outburst against brands and did not have much to say in conversations.
Major brands including Apple (AAPL.O), Walt Disney (DIS.N) and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD.O) also suspended their ads on X this month following a report from liberal watchdog group Media Matters, which said ads had appeared next to antisemitic posts.
The original article contains 267 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 24%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Even if there was a totally illegitimate and unethical reason people were mad at X, that's still not "blackmail". That's just business. No business wants to have their brand tarnished or lose money. That's the opposite goal of advertising. No business would continue to lose money in pursuit of "free speech". Only Musk will do that.