Amazon has cranked up its ad spending on X after previously cutting its investments in advertising on the social media platform over hate speech concerns, per media reports.
The company, which has also discussed testing ads on the platform, previously pulled its dollars from the site in 2023, The Wall Street Journal reports, noting that Amazon Chief Executive, Andy Jassy, was involved in the move. The switch-up comes as Amazon and X owners, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, appear to scooch in closer to one another in business, as two the tech CEOs continue their support of President Donald Trump.
Back in December, it was reported that Bezos’ Amazon planned to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Musk, who Trump named as the co-lead of his Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) with Vivek Ramaswamym donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, also contributed $1 million to Trump’s campaign. The trio, who boasts a combined net worth of $855 billion, attended Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
With Amazon putting its cards back in the deck, their dollars will help boost X’s finances, as the investment banks Musk borrowed from to acquire X have hit a wall in their efforts to dump the debt from their books, per WSJ.
“Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even,” Musk said in an email, and has since denied saying, WSJ reports.
In 2023, the Center for Countering Digital Hate released research from a study that showed that X had took no action against 99% of the 100 Twitter Blue accounts that were tweeting what could be considered hate speech. In August 2023, Musk sued the company over alleged lost ad dollars, claiming CCDH made “a series of troubling and baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter generally and its digital advertising business specifically.”
In November 2023, CCDH published a subsequent report stating 98% of 200 tweets that it flagged to the social media platform are still up for users to see after two weeks. All the posts in the sample breached some form of X platform rules against hateful content, dehumanization, and hateful imagery. On Nov. 18, 2023, several tech and media companies, including Disney, Apple, Paramount Global and more pulled their ads from X over antisemitism following a report by Media Matters that found several major companies, including Apple, Amazon and NBCUniversal’s Bravo had advertisements showing up next to posts that included white nationalist rhetoric.
