It seems OpenAI doesn’t have the monopoly on corporate meltdowns as the team from X is having a pretty bad few weeks themselves.
It began with an article by media watchdog group Media Matters which showed screenshots of X accounts with pro-Nazi leanings being paired with ads for Apple, Oracle, IBM, and Xfinity.
The article came a day after Elon Musk replied to a racist tweet by an X user that accused Jewish people of promoting “hatred among whites.”
Musk’s reply stated that the user spoke “the actual truth.”
The condemnation was swift with many of X’s largest remaining advertisers suspending all ad buys on the platform.
The companies that have suspended their buys include Apple, IBM, Lionsgate Media, Disney, Comcast, Paramount Global, Warner Brothers, Discovery, and Sony Pictures.
In response, Musk filed suit against Media Matters threatening a “thermonuclear” case charging the company with fraudulently attacking X and creating the pictures that showed the ads next to the pro-Nazi posts.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino later shed more light on how the screenshots were captured which seems to contradict Musk’s assertions that the screen captures were made up.
It is more likely that Media Matters created accounts that followed various neo-Nazi X accounts, while simultaneously following accounts from major advertisers like Apple and IBM.
Yaccarino tried to couch the problem as an outside case where Media Matters tricked their algorithm and claimed that only a few people saw the ads next to the content.
The admission that Media Matters was able to create a situation in which the accounts and ads were paired seems to severely undercut the “thermonuclear” part of the lawsuit.
Media Matters says that it would vigorously defend its reporting.
Just a month ago, Musk admitted that the market value of X had dropped from $44 billion when he acquired it to an estimated $4 billion, and that was before the latest rounds of advertisers departed.
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