When Will Orgs Learn That Xitter Is a Nazi Bar Now?

Add the World Bank to the list of orgs finding out the hard (and dumb) way that Twitter is a cesspool of racist hate that should be avoided at all costs, especially when it comes to paid advertising efforts. It’s a Nazi bar now and a brand safety nightmare.

The World Bank has ceased all paid advertising on Elon Musk's social media platform X, which was formerly Twitter, after a CBS News investigation found promoted advertisements from the organization showing up under a racist post from an account that prolifically posts pro-Nazi and white nationalist content. 

CBS News found a verified X account with more than 115,000 followers that had posted a racist image alongside a post praising Europe's colonization of Africa. CBS News is not publicly identifying the accounts spreading racist content on X. 

A promoted advertisement for the World Bank showed up in the comments section below the post. 

"The World Bank Group had already reduced its paid marketing on X while working with the platform to implement the strongest safety protocols X offers for our content," a spokesperson for the World Bank told CBS News on Friday, adding: "This latest incident is entirely unacceptable, and we are immediately ceasing all paid marketing on X."

So how did that all that working “with the platform to implement the strongest safety protocols X offers for our content” work out? Yeah, just…look at this.

Anyone, either in-house at the World Bank or an exterior vendor, who signed off on this should be looking for work soon. Xitter didn’t become a Nazi bar overnight. It’s been this way for quite some time now. Anyone paying any attention at all could’ve predicted exactly how this would turn out. None of this is in any way out of the ordinary now:

The account has shared dozens of  antisemitic and racist posts over the course of the past week alone, and CBS News found promoted advertisements from numerous businesses under multiple posts from the account as it shared pro-Nazi content, including one post showing archival video of Adolf Hitler with the caption: "We defeated the wrong enemy." That post has garnered more than two million views on the platform, according to X's own metrics. 

….

The thread shared by the account included pro-Nazi posts that said "antisemites will save the world," and "Weimar problems require Weimar solutions" with the "Weimar problems" phrase painted in the colors of the LGBTQ rainbow flag. The Weimar Republic was a name used for Germany before Hitler rose to power with the Nazi regime. 

Given that they claim to have been actively working with X to protect their brand, they can’t blame programmatic either, something X got desperate enough for ad dollars last year to start working with Google to sell their ad inventory to the bots.

Look, there is less and less reason for orgs to engage Xitter in the same manner they have in the past, but there is zero reason at all for non-fashy orgs to be paying Musk to put their brands adjacent to straight-up Nazi stuff. None. It seems some new org has to learn this blisteringly obvious lesson every day now.