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Advertisers boycott Musk’s X as White House blasts ‘anti-Semitic tweet’

The White House has condemned Elon Musk’s endorsement of what it calls a “hideous” anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on X as major US companies including Disney, Warner Bros Discovery and NBCUniversal parent Comcast pause their advertisements on his social media site.

Musk, who is Jewish, on Wednesday agreed with a post on X that falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people, saying the user who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was speaking “the actual truth”.

That conspiracy theory claims 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”.

The White House accused Musk of an “abhorrent promotion of anti-Semitic and racist hate” that “runs against our core values as Americans”.

“It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie … one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said, referring to the October 7 attack by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas on Israel.

In addition to Disney, Warner Bros Discovery and Comcast, Lions Gate Entertainment and Paramount Global said on Friday they also were pausing their ads on X.

Axios reported that Apple, the world’s largest company by market value, was also pausing its ads.

IBM on Thursday halted its advertising on X after a report found its ads were placed next to content promoting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Media Matters said it found that corporate advertisements by IBM, Apple, Oracle and Comcast’s Xfinity were being placed alongside anti-Semitic content.

Advertisers have fled the site, formerly called Twitter, since Musk bought it in October 2022 and reduced content moderation, resulting in a sharp rise in hate speech on X, according to civil rights groups.

Representatives for Musk and X declined to comment on his post.

“When it comes to this platform – X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat anti-Semitism and discrimination,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote on Thursday.

“There’s no place for it anywhere in the world – it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.”

Anti-Semitism has been on the rise in recent years in the US and worldwide.

Following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas after last month’s attack, anti-Semitic incidents in the US rose by almost 400 per cent from the year-earlier period, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organisation that fights anti-Semitism.

Musk, chief executive of electric vehicle maker Tesla and founder of rocket company SpaceX, has blamed the Anti-Defamation League for the ongoing drop in advertisers, without offering any evidence.

-AAP

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