7:08 PM UTC – December 1, 2023
(Reuters) – Walmart (WMT.N) said on Friday it is not advertising on social media platform X, one of the latest brands to say it has dropped the Elon Musk-owned site.
“We aren’t advertising on X as we’ve found other platforms to better reach our customers,” a Walmart spokesperson said.
X, formerly known as Twitter, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The platform has struggled to retain advertisers since Musk acquired the company in October 2022, and faced a fresh exodus in recent weeks over rising concern about antisemitic content.
Earlier this month, Musk agreed with an X user who falsely claimed members of the Jewish community were stoking hatred against white people, saying the user was speaking “the actual truth.”
The user had also referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which purports that Jewish people and leftists are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations with non-white immigrants that will lead to a “white genocide.”
Musk apologized for his post during an interview at a New York Times DealBook event on Wednesday, but hurled expletives against advertisers that suspended their ads, accusing them of “blackmail.”
An executive at a major ad-buying agency, who declined to be named, said X ad sales representatives appeared frustrated in the aftermath of Musk’s outburst against brands and did not have much to say in conversations.
Major brands including Apple (AAPL.O), Walt Disney (DIS.N) and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD.O) also suspended their ads on X this month following a report from liberal watchdog group Media Matters, which said ads had appeared next to antisemitic posts.
Reporting by Siddharth Cavale in New York and Sheila Dang in Dallas; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Berkrot
