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“The company experiences a significant 50 percent decline in ad revenue.”
X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, is rolling out new features that give advertisers more control over the content that appears near their ads. This move comes as X faces a decline in ad revenue, which has dropped by 50 percent since Elon Musk took over as CEO. Brands have been cutting spending on the platform due to concerns about hate speech and other objectionable content. Several instances have been reported where major brand ads were placed alongside neo-Nazi accounts, Holocaust deniers, and previously suspended users.
The new “sensitivity settings” introduced by X allow advertisers to choose different types of content filtering for their ads. The company plans to use machine learning to reduce adjacency to various levels of content based on a brand’s sensitivity threshold. Initially, advertisers have the option to select between “conservative” and “standard” settings. The “conservative” setting excludes ads from appearing near targeted hate speech, sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity, obscenity, spam, and drugs in the “for You” timeline. The “standard” option avoids the same topics but permits spam and drug-related content. X also intends to add a “relaxed” setting for advertisers seeking maximum reach with fewer restrictions on content placement.
X has previously introduced keyword-based “adjacency controls” to promote brand safety. However, these changes, implemented in December, have had minimal impact on X’s ad business. While the company claims to have effectively limited the reach of hate speech on its platform, researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) have contradicted these claims. According to the CCDH, hate speech has surged in terms of volume and engagement since Musk took over as CEO. X disputes these findings and has filed a lawsuit against CCDH, accusing the group of illegally scraping data.