The European Commission told its departments on Friday, November 17, 2023, to stop buying advertising on X. The reason, given by spokesman Johannes Bahrke, was “an alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech on several social media platforms in recent weeks”, of which, he said, “X is certainly quite effected”.
What Brussels actually said
The instruction was narrow. Bahrke said services should “refrain from advertising, at this stage” on the platforms concerned, where the Commission worried that its content might surface in an inappropriate context. Only X was affected so far, he added, and the step covered advertising only. Official EU accounts were not leaving the site.
CBS News carried a slightly different framing from a Commission spokesman, who said the pause applied to all social networks and was not specifically about X. “This is about advertisement campaigns,” the spokesman said, adding that the Commission continuously assesses the media environment for its campaigns. The two accounts are not easy to square, but the practical effect was the same for X.
Notably, the decision did not name Elon Musk. Bloomberg observed that the Commission’s statement did not cite his posts, and the move was first reported by Politico.
A crowded exit
The timing was awkward for X. The week had brought a Media Matters report showing ads from IBM, Apple, Oracle and Comcast’s Xfinity running beside Nazi-themed material, and Musk had called an antisemitic post “the actual truth”. IBM suspended its advertising. Apple and Disney paused theirs, according to the Wall Street Journal. Lionsgate, Warner Bros. and Comcast were also named among the advertisers pulling back.
X had little to lose from Brussels itself, if its own account is to be believed. Joe Benarroch, the company’s head of business operations, told Bloomberg that the Commission had spent only about $US5,000 on advertising so far that year, and was still posting organically across all its X handles.
Other business between the two
The announcement came a month after the Commission opened an investigation into whether X had allowed disinformation to spread around the Israel-Gaza conflict. That probe was one of several launched under the Digital Services Act, the bloc’s new law requiring large platforms to deal with illegal content.
The Commission had its own awkward episode with advertising on the platform. Questions had been raised over its use of targeted ads on X to promote proposed legislation that would oblige messaging services to scan for child-abuse imagery. Home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson admitted the month before that the campaign may have breached the bloc’s own rules.
For a platform whose advertising had already fallen 60% in September, according to Bloomberg News reporter Aisha Counts, the loss of one institutional customer was small in dollars. It was less small in symbolism.
Sources
- EU halts advertising on X over 'hate speech'
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