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New Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed that “activist groups” are pressuring advertisers to boycott Twitter.
He doubled down on the claim on Monday, responding to conservative activist and Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton’s tweet asking if Musk had “tortious interference claims against left activist groups which are causing damaging advertiser boycotts of the platform,” implying those activists could have illegally impacted Twitter’s contracts with clients. (Neither Musk nor Fitton are lawyers.)
Meanwhile, some progressive activist groups are claiming to have made an impact on Twitter’s bottom line. On Friday, the president and CEO of progressive media watchdog Media Matters for America, Angelo Carusone, tweeted that an activist coalition called “Stop the Deal” had encouraged brands and media buyers to “ask Twitter some basic questions about potential Musk takeover before giving him a guaranteed income for 2023” during the NewFronts earlier this year. In another tweet, Carusone said that “Twitter had zero answers or assurances,” and, “from what I understand basically sold almost nothing.”
Carusone told Marketing Brew that Media Matters had talked with “almost all” of the 20 top advertisers on the platform, though he didn’t say which.
“The advertisers are actually taking action. And specifically, they’re recalibrating their ad purchases to sort of shift away from or entirely move away from Twitter, or they’re holding,” Carusone told Marketing Brew.
Separately, the NAACP and the ADL have called on advertisers to pause campaigns on Twitter citing content-moderation concerns, but Carusone told Marketing Brew that they were not a part of the Stop the Deal coalition.
Multiple sources at media agencies told Marketing Brew that, to their working knowledge, activist groups have not played a role in their decisions regarding advertising spend on Twitter.
As Marketing Brew reported last week, the advertising company IPG, which owns media agencies including UM and Mediahub, advised clients to pause campaigns on Twitter, citing a situation that it called “unpredictable and chaotic.” Companies including General Mills, Audi, and Pfizer have all said they’re pausing their campaigns on Twitter, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Later Monday morning, Musk tweeted and deleted a masturbation joke.