Media Matters Distorts Study Findings, Falsely Claiming Antisemitism is Rampant on X
Media Matters For America published an article alleging that the social media platform X has been placing ads for major companies next to pro-Nazi content. “As X owner Elon Musk continues his descent into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories,” wrote Media Matters reporter Eric Hananoki, “his social media platform has been placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.”
However, according to the X Safety team, Media Matters’ report was done by making a fake X account and then curating posts and ads to manipulate the account’s timeline. “These contrived experiences could be applied to any platform,” X argues. X’s analytics suggest that Media Matters repeatedly refreshed the timeline of the account it created to cause X to generate ads near hateful posts. The account, X says, saw thirteen times the number of ads a median X user sees. According to X, in at least one instance, the Media Matters author was the only user to see a specific ad placement. “Of the 5.5 billion ad impressions on X that day, less than 50 total ad impressions were served against all of the organic content featured in the Media Matters article,” X Safety wrote.
Public attempted to reproduce Media Matters’ methods to see if we found ads next to the content in question. Ultimately creating an account and following 11 of the neo-Nazi accounts in Media Matters’ report, and after refreshing both X’s “For You” page and “Following” page more than ten times and scrolling through the timeline each in each case, Public did not observe ads next to white nationalist or pro-Nazi content.
Public then followed 30 more extremist accounts and repeated this process, but still did not find hateful ads on the timeline. The experiment also opened each account’s page, and ads were not observed there, nor under the replies to their posts.
It’s possible that Public’s methods did not exactly replicate Media Matters’ or that our account was too new to see ads. It’s also possible that X has already changed its ad policy in response to Media Matters, or there are fewer ads on the platform now that major advertisers have left. X nor Public’s study fully confirm nor negate the findings in Media Matters’ experiment, but the two studies do suggest that the ad incidents Media Matters found were very rare in the status quo.
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