The IT Nerd

Elon Musk is currently rage suing Media Matters because they called Twitter out for the fact that Media Matters said it found that corporate advertisements by IBM, Apple, Oracle and Comcast’s Xfinity were being placed alongside antisemitic content. That led to a number of companies pulling their ads from Twitter. But Media Matters is not the only group who have found a connection between big brands having their ads being placed alongside antisemitic content. NewsGuard, to nobody’s surprise, have found misinformation related to the Israel/Hamas war being placed alongside ads on Twitter:

On X, programmatic advertisements for dozens of major brands, governments, educational institutions and non-profits are being displayed in the feeds directly below viral posts advancing false or egregiously misleading claims about the Israel-Hamas war, a NewsGuard analysis has found. Under the terms of a new advertising revenue sharing program that X introduced for its “creators,” a portion of the advertising income generated by these organizations would apparently be shared with these super-spreaders of misinformation. 

From Nov. 13 to Nov. 22, 2023, NewsGuard analysts reviewed programmatic ads that appeared in the feeds below 30 viral tweets that contained false or egregiously misleading information about the war. Programmatic ads are served via algorithms to target digital ads to online readers. Brands typically do not select where programmatic ads run and indeed are unaware of where their programmatic ads appear.

These 30 viral tweets were posted by ten of X’s worst purveyors of Israel-Hamas war-related misinformation; these accounts have previously been identified by NewsGuard as repeat spreaders of misinformation about the conflict. These 30 tweets have cumulatively reached an audience of over 92 million viewers, according to X data. On average, each tweet was seen by 3 million people. 

A list of the 30 tweets and the 10 accounts used in NewsGuard’s analysis is available here.

The 30 tweets advanced some of the most egregious false or misleading claims about the war, which NewsGuard had previously debunked in its Misinformation Fingerprints database of the most significant false and misleading claims spreading online. These include that the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel was a “false flag” and that CNN staged footage of an October 2023 rocket attack on a news crew in Israel. Half of the tweets (15) were flagged with a fact-check by Community Notes, X’s crowd-source fact-checking feature, which under the X policy would have made them ineligible for advertising revenue. However, the other half did not feature a Community Note. Ads for major brands, such as Pizza Hut, Airbnb, Microsoft, Paramount, and Oracle, were found by NewsGuard on posts with and without a Community Note (more on this below).

In total, NewsGuard analysts cumulatively identified 200 ads from 86 major brands, nonprofits, educational institutions, and governments that appeared in the feeds below 24 of the 30 tweets containing false or egregiously misleading claims about the Israel-Hamas war. The other six tweets did not feature advertisements. (On X, ads appear as “tweets” that are shown to users in feeds.) The ads NewsGuard found were served to analysts browsing the internet using their own X accounts in five countries: the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, and Italy.

I encourage you to read the full report as it gives additional details as well methodology. But what’s clear here is that despite what Elon says, Twitter has serious issues that would scare any advertiser off the platform. Not only that, it in a way validates what Media Matters says. Which means that Media Matters is likely about to validate their response to Elon. Which is that they will win Elon’s rage lawsuit.