The ADL Resumes Promoting on X After Recent Clashes Over Hate Speech

It appears that evidently Elon Musk’s recent efforts to meet with community leaders, and address concerns around antisemitism, have appeased the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), with the organization issuing an announcement today with regard to X’s progress, and its subsequent recommendations for prospective X advertisers.

The ADL has come under fire from Musk in recent weeks amid concerns that the group had been pushing advertisers to boycott X, resulting from changes to the app’s moderation rules, which the ADL had found has led to more instances of hate speech in X posts.

Musk refuted the ADL’s claims, and even threatened to sue the organization for lack of earnings in consequence of its reports.

But for now no less than, the 2 sides appear to have called a truce, based on X’s stated efforts to enhance, and combat hate speech.

As per the ADL:   

“We appreciate X’s stated intent over the previous couple of weeks to deal with antisemitism and hate on the platform. This has been useful; more must be done; and, as we have now with other firms, within the spirit of collaboration, we’re hopeful that we will proceed to interact with X on this necessary matter.”

The ADL hasn’t detailed any specific actions that X has undertaken, outside of meeting with the ADL and Jewish leaders to debate its efforts. X itself has repeatedly claimed that hate speech is well down within the app, year-over-year, but third-party evaluation suggests the other, which was the premise of the ADL’s original criticism of the corporate.

Whether X has been in a position to persuade the ADL of that is unclear, though the specter of legal motion does appear to have played no less than some part within the ADL issuing an official statement.

“To be clear, any allegation that ADL has someway orchestrated a boycott of X or caused billions of dollars of losses to the corporate or is “pulling the strings” for other advertisers is fake. Indeed, we ourselves were promoting on the platform until the anti-ADL attacks began just a few weeks ago. We now are preparing to achieve this again to bring our necessary message on fighting hate to X and its users.”

So even the ADL itself is now seeking to run ads on X again, which is an enormous win for the app in convincing others of its brand safety focus.

Again, X maintains that it’s doing greater than ever to make sure hate speech is addressed, while it’s also established latest third-party verification partnerships to guarantee advertisers that their content won’t be shown alongside potentially offensive material. X can also be developing latest brand safety tiers to assist businesses avoid potentially problematic content, and it appears that evidently, together, all of those efforts have been enough to persuade the ADL that it’s making progress.

Given Musk’s public criticisms of the ADL, it is a significant update, and it’ll be interesting to see if it has the form of impact on X’s ad business as he seems to imagine the ADL’s initial statements had.