Less than 24 hours after Elon Musk made an anti-Semitic post on Thursday to contain the consequences.
Employee of . IBM cut about $1 million in advertising spending on the platform in the final three months of the year, the notes said.
In a note to employees Thursday morning, Ms. Yaccarino said that “X is a platform for everyone” and that “discrimination by everyone should stop across the board.” She said the company had been clear about its work to combat anti-Semitism and discrimination and later announced this a similar message on X
In a statement, IBM said it “has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately stopped all advertising on X while we investigate this completely unacceptable situation.”
X did not respond to a request for comment. The Financial Times previously reported on IBM’s commercial break for X.
Mr Musk, who bought Twitter last year and renamed it X, has faced increasing criticism for tolerating and even encouraging anti-Semitic slurs on his social media platform. He has attacked George Soros, the financier who is a frequent target of anti-Semitic abuse, and threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League, a human rights group that has highlighted the rise in anti-Semitism on X.
On Wednesday, Mr. Musk went further when he agreed with a post from an The Jewish people are now “coming to the disturbing realization that the hordes of minorities who support the flooding of their land do not particularly like them,” the report continued.
“You told the actual truth,” Mr. Musk replied to the post.
Jewish groups have compared the statement Mr. Musk endorsed to the “Great Replacement Theory,” the far-right idea that minorities are replacing the white European population.
“It is the deadliest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in modern US history,” said the American Jewish Committee, a US-based Israeli advocacy group. wrote on X on Thursday. “Amplifying it on @X is incredibly dangerous.”
Social media platforms in general have come under increasing scrutiny since Hamas attacked Israel last month and Israel retaliated. Anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate speech has increased sharply across all websites and was particularly pronounced on X, according to the Anti-Defamation League and researchers. On Wednesday evening, more than a dozen Jewish YouTubers and celebrities confronted TikTok executives in a private meeting, urging them to do more to address the rise in anti-Semitism and harassment on the video service.
In September, Mr. Musk met with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, at a Tesla factory in the San Francisco Bay Area after he faced accusations of anti-Semitism.
“It’s not easy to be vilified – I know you’ve never seen that before, right?” Mr Netanyahu once asked Mr Musk.
“Me, slandered?” Mr. Musk said, laughing. “Never.”
At X, Ms. Yaccarino has already intervened in situations involving anti-Semitic content on the platform. This month, a sales representative reported apparently anti-Semitic posts that the site had failed to remove, prompting Ms. Yaccarino to request a review of the posts, two people familiar with the situation said. The employee who reported the posts is no longer with the company, they said. The Information previously reported Ms. Yaccarino’s actions regarding these posts.
On Thursday morning, sales reps from They also cited an article from Media Matters for America, a left-wing advocacy group, that showed big-brand ads appeared on X alongside posts promoting white nationalist and Nazi perspectives.
“Many major advertisers were targeted in this article,” one employee wrote.
Another employee wrote that she was concerned because she works with Apple, a major advertiser mentioned in the Media Matters article, and questioned whether some of the posts were “manipulated.” An employee responded that the company’s trust and safety team, which has experienced layoffs and terminations, is “actively investigating this matter.”
Mike Isaac and Kate Conger contributed reporting.