Companies Using Twitter Tools to Keep Ads Away From Musk’s Tweets: NYT

While Elon Musk claims that “almost all advertisers have come back to Twitter,” some still don’t want anything to do with the company’s CEO.

The New York Times, citing four people familiar with Twitter’s advertising situation, reported that certain brands that have returned to advertising on the platform are using Twitter’s adjacency controls to keep their content clear of increasingly troubling content — including Musk’s own tweets.

Jason Kint, chief executive of Digital Content Next, told the Times that Twitter is “unpredictable and chaotic” adding that, “Advertisers want to run in an environment where they are comfortable and can send a signal about their brand.”

Announced in December 2022, just a few months after Musk took control of the company, adjacency controls aimed to enable advertisers to prevent their ads from appearing adjacent to Tweets that use keywords they’d like to avoid.

“Empowering brands to customize their campaigns to prevent their ads from appearing adjacent to unsuitable content is an important step towards increased ad relevance on Twitter,” said an undated December blog post written by Engineering Lead Nina Chen and Head of Brand Safety AJ Brown.

Both Chen and Brown are no longer with the company. Neither immediately responded to Insider’s request for comment.

Insider previously reported that Brown attempted to counter the growing perception that Twitter wasn’t safe for brands with a later blog post about the company’s partnerships with adtech companies DoubleVerify and IAS, which were meant to help with brand safety. 

One individual at the company who seems unconcerned with brand safety is Musk himself.

He has deployed an array of bizarre tweets, from antisemitic conspiracy theories to anti-transgender content and anti-vaccine misinformation.

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2023

Citing a series of Musk tweets about financier George Soros, Ted Deutch, the chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, told the Times that “the lie Jews want to destroy civilization has led to the persecution of Jewish people for centuries.”

He added, “Musk should know better.”

Twitter responded to Insider’s request for comment with a poop emoji.