Major advertisers have left Twitter since Elon Musk took over the platform a little more than a week ago, amid concerns about an increase in misinformation, hate speech and other objectionable content under his watch. Musk’s company-wide layoffs cut significant portions of the company’s content moderation team and the entire Ethical AI team, eventually. Musk, who spent his early days on Twitter talking about how great things are going to be for advertisers, responded by threatening his own ad clients. “A thermonuclear name and shame is exactly what will happen if this continues,” Musk tweeted on Friday. He was so flustered that he admitted Twitter was in trouble on Friday: “Twitter has had a huge drop in revenue because of activist groups pushing advertisers.” This is a confusing strategy, to say the least. Twitter lacks the targeted advertising capability that marketers require when trying to sell individual products and services, so most of Twitter’s ad revenue comes from brand awareness campaigns. Companies that pay to promote their image are more concerned about running ads alongside inappropriate content, and it’s hard to imagine how threatening to tarnish brands will promote healthy business relationships. There’s good reason for companies to be concerned, even though Musk said “nothing has changed with content retention.” Tesla’s billionaire CEO is making strong and conflicting statements about how he plans to broker the platform, simultaneously declaring Twitter a haven for free speech absolutism while promising it won’t turn into a “free-for-all.” . Since the SpaceX CEO took over, the platform has seen a huge spike in hate speech, with use of the N-word jumping 500%, according to a report. Musk himself tweeted and then deleted an apparently false conspiracy theory to attack House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Twitter controls only a fraction of the digital ad market. For most large companies that buy ads on Twitter, the money they spend there is almost an afterthought in their overall marketing budgets. Cutting off that stream of advertising dollars may not be a difficult business decision for many companies, meaning the general sentiment about Twitter could have a huge impact on the social media company’s bottom line. It’s early days for Musk’s version of Twitter, so corporate America is taking a wait-and-see approach to working with the platform. Meanwhile, at least 10 blue chip advertisers have closed their wallets. Here’s a list of the biggest companies that have stopped advertising on Twitter.
