X

Social media outlet X won’t mark the spot for Madison Avenue until its two top executives align around a single approach.

Sony Pictures has pulled the plug for now on any advertising on X/Twitter. In what is a rising tide, Sony is the latest Hollywood and tech company to leave the platform over X owner Elon Musk‘s retweet of a distinctly anti-semitic post about 48 hours ago. Musk’s promises Friday of new protections on X against hate speech has drawn some very rare praise from usual foil the Anti-Defamation League, but the moves seem to have done little to nothing to stop the growing corporate boycott.

Lionsgate Entertainment has suspended advertising on Elon Musk-owned X, a spokesperson for the company said on Friday. Apple is also pausing all advertising on X, Axios reported, after Musk backed an antisemitic post on the social media platform earlier this week.

IBM, a major advertiser on X, has pulled its spending from the social media platform, whose employees are grappling with what to tell its other advertisers, according to internal messages. X’s chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, and others at the company scrambled on Thursday to contain the fallout.

Now rebranded as X, the site has experienced a surge in racist, antisemitic and other hateful speech. Under Musk’s watch, millions of people have been exposed to misinformation about climate change. Foreign governments and operatives — from Russia to China to Hamas — have spread divisive propaganda with little or no interference.

The unexplained decision removes the only symbol distinguishing the news organization from impostors and comes amid a flood of false information related to the Israel-Gaza war, some of which Musk has personally endorsed.

The company said late Tuesday that it has started trying out the annual subscription method for new and unverified accounts. The program, dubbed Not a Bot, won’t apply to existing users. It’s not clear why it only applies to New Zealand and the Philippines or why those countries were chosen.

Musk’s volatile leadership of the social-media platform has pushed down its prices — which might give it an edge.

On Monday night the safety team for X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, detailed what they say are recent actions taken to limit hateful and violent posts and combat misinformation following the Hamas attacks on Israel over the weekend. Among other things, the safety team said in a statement that it has removed “hundreds” of Hamas-affiliated accounts that were created after the attacks, and has “actioned tens of thousands of posts for sharing graphic media, violent speech, and hateful conduct.” (Adel Hana/AP)

The agency said Musk was subpoenaed to testify last month about his purchases of Twitter’s stock last year, but he failed to appear.

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X Corp. may have aspirations of transforming its microblog formerly known as Twitter into the “everything app,” but one thing it has a lot less of since Elon Musk acquired it, is share of social media ad spending. Twitter/X’s share has dwindled to 5% of U.S. ad spending compiled by Guideline from actual invoiced media buys processed by the major agency holding companies and big independent media agencies. That’s down from 12% in the period preceding Musk’s reign, which closed Oct. 27, 2022.

According to X CEO Linda Yaccarino, the company formerly known as Twitter will be profitable by early 2024. “Now that I have immersed myself in the business, and we have a good set of eyes on what is predictable, what’s coming is that it looks like in early ’24, we will be turning a profit,” Yaccarino said on stage at the Code Conference. That’s a big statement for a company that didn’t turn an annual profit in its first 13 years, and which has struggled to maintain profitability since — let alone for a company that was bought by Elon Musk only a year ago.

The American TV personality Tucker Carlson has lambasted the United States for sending too much aid to Ukraine, called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “sweaty and rat-like,” and given credence to Russia’s baseless justifications for its invasion. The former Fox News host’s rhetoric on the war — he has called it a U.S.-led “regime-change war” against Russia — and his attacks on Zelensky’s government — “a pure client state of the United States State Department” — aligns so well with the major propaganda points of Russian state television that one channel has decided to broadcast Carlson’s new show on X, formerly Twitter, to millions of Russians, though apparently without Carlson’s permission.

Elon Musk said that X, formerly known as Twitter, is moving to a “small monthly payment system” because “it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.” In a discussion Monday with Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Musk suggested that it would be a lower-tier pricing structure than its $8-per-month Twitter Blue, its premium subscription service.

Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X (formerly Twitter) has unveiled a new leadership and sales team at the social platform, including a number of executives familiar to the media and entertainment business.

Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and others discussed artificial intelligence with lawmakers, as tech companies strive to influence potential regulations.

The social network has introduced Community Notes, an existing program for crowdsourced moderation, for videos. The Elon Musk-owned platform announced that notes by contributors attached to a video will show up in all posts with that video. “Notes written on videos will automatically show on other posts containing matching videos. A highly-scalable way of adding context to edited clips, AI-generated videos, and more,” the company said in a post.

Facebook and YouTube are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

X’s failure to slow the spread of disinformation on the internet would have violated E.U. social media law, had it been in effect.

X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, said Tuesday it would now allow political advertising in the U.S. from candidates and political parties and expand its safety and elections team ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Before billionaire Elon Musk acquired the company last October, Twitter had banned all political ads globally since 2019. In January, Twitter lifted the ban and began allowing “cause-based ads” in the U.S. that raise awareness of issues such as voter registration, and said it planned to expand the types of political ads it would allow on the platform.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have decided they don’t need the news industry. That’s causing problems when natural disasters strike.

Absent for more than two years, former President Donald J. Trump posted his mug shot on the site, now called X.

Twitter’s owner plans to strip headlines from news articles shared on X (ex-Twitter). Right now, links to news articles are displayed as “Cards,” consisting of an image, a link, a headline, and a summary of the article, which doesn’t count against X’s post character limits. If Musk goes through with his idea, links to news articles would be stripped from all text, leaving just the lead image and the URL as the links to the actual article.

A web version of the new text-first app is one of the features users have asked for and could help it compete with X after decline in usage.

The Twitter add-on, popular among journalists, is now available only to users who have subscribed to X Premium.

The site formerly known as Twitter has added a five-second delay when a user clicks on a shortened link to the New York Times, Facebook and other sites Musk commonly attacks, a Washington Post analysis found.

X, the company formerly known as Twitter, will no longer allow advertisers to promote their accounts within the platform’s timeline to attract new followers, according to an email to advertising clients.

Elon Musk–owned social network X, formerly Twitter, said late Thursday that it is lowering requirements for its creator payout program. The company said that the creators who have garnered 5 million impressions in the last three months will be eligible for ad revenue sharing — a third of the previous 15 million impression requirement. Creators will be able to withdraw as low as $10 instead of $50, the company said. Users still need to be verified and must have at least 500 followers to qualify for payouts.

The Elon Musk-led X Corp. has commandeered “@music” from a long-time user, software developer Jeremy Vaught. Vaught created the “@music” account in 2007 and built a community of around half a million followers on the platform. His new handle, assigned to him by the company, is “@musicfan.” X terms of service say it has the right to take back a username — the threat of losing a handle could make it difficult for the company to convince creators to build there long-term.

The two tech billionaires seemingly agreed to a “cage match” face-off in late June. Zuckerberg is actually trained in mixed martial arts, and the CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta posted about completing his first jiu jitsu tournament earlier this year. “Zuck v Musk fight will be live-streamed on X,” Musk wrote in a post Sunday on the platform. “All proceeds will go to charity for veterans.”