Car company Hyundai stopped displaying ads on social media site X after one of its paid posts appeared alongside harmful content related to Jewish people and Nazis, as confirmed by the company to The Hill.
Hyundai said in a statement to The Hill that they have temporarily stopped their ads on X and are talking directly to X about keeping their brand safe and addressing this issue.
NBC News first reported the ad pause.
Freelance journalist Nancy Levine Stearns posted a screenshot of the ad appearing in the feed of an X user who frequently posts Holocaust denial and antisemitic remarks. The ad was next to a post labeled “Violent Event Denial” regarding the Holocaust, Joe Benarroch, the head of X business operations, confirmed to The Hill.
The account, which had antisemitic tropes in its bio, was later suspended, according to Benarroch.
Hyundai ran the ad for about six weeks with a focus on climate change to “reach” lawmakers, he added.
“The Hyundai campaign was done self-serve, without the support of X’s direct sales team — and unfortunately, its agency Brunswick did not activate Brand Safety settings controls available to them,” Benarroch wrote in a statement, adding X worked with Brunswick to correct the ad settings.
“Hyundai is considering its next steps as it refreshes the 6-week-old campaign,” he continued.
The Hill reached out to Brunswick for further comment.
The platform X has faced increased scrutiny over its content moderation policies since it was bought in 2022 by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who rolled back on some restrictive policies.
The Anti-Defamation League in November 2022 said there was a 61.3 percent increase in the volume of posts referencing “Jews” or “Judaism” with antisemitic content in the two weeks after Musk took over X, then known as Twitter.
Musk and his social media platform came under renewed fire last fall after he appeared to endorse an antisemitic conspiracy theory that suggested antisemitism was carried out by minorities and that Jewish people were to blame.
Several high-profile companies pulled their advertisements after reports circulated that their ads were placed next to posts celebrating Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party on the platform.
