US agribusiness giant General Mills has halted ad spending on Twitter, in another sign of advertisers’ concern about new platform owner Elon Musk’s view of tweaking social media content.
“We have suspended the announcement on Twitter,” Kelsey Rumhelt, a spokeswoman for General Mills, which includes the Cheerios and Häagen-Dazs brands, confirmed to AFP. “We will continue to monitor the development of the situation and assess our marketing spending,” she added.
As of Friday, the day after the Tesla boss took over Twitter, automaker General Motors indicated that it had temporarily stopped paying for ads on Twitter.
Thursday , Wall Street Magazine Similar decisions were allegedly made by Mondelez International (the maker of Oreo cookies), Pfizer and Audi (Volkswagen).
Advertisers, who account for 90% of the platform’s revenue, fear that the liberalization of content modification regulations advocated by Elon Musk will make the platform inhospitable. Most brands prefer to avoid association with non-compatible content.
Since Thursday, the liberal businessman has been trying to reassure them. He wrote them a letter promising that Twitter would not become a “hell” platform, “where anything can be said without consequences.”
He also promised to form a content board, and it took a few weeks before some banned people – such as Donald Trump – were reauthorized to return to the social network.
But neither advertisers nor many NGOs seem to be convinced at the moment.
A group of nearly 50 Democratic and anti-disinformation societies has sent an open letter to the 20 largest advertisers on Twitter, including Coca-Cola, Google and Disney, urging them to threaten Elon Musk to stop all ads on the platform if he implements it. A plan to “undermine brand integrity and community standards, including filtering content moderation.”
On Wednesday, Elon Musk asked in a poll of 113 million subscribers whether advertisers should “support free speech” or “political correctness.”
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