IBM pulled ads from X after their ads appeared next to pro-Nazi content. Apple paused spending. Disney pulled out. Lionsgate, Paramount, Warner Bros., all gone. Elon Musk's response to advertisers concerned about brand safety was, and I quote, "Go f--- yourself."
And yet, I still see brand strategists debating whether leaving X is a "political statement" or a "business decision." As if those are the only two options. As if there isn't a third, blindingly obvious answer: it's a brand safety decision, and it's not even a close call.
As if there isn't a third, blindingly obvious answer: it's a brand safety decision, and it's not even a close call.
Let me be very clear about what brand safety means, because it's gotten muddled in the culture war discourse: brand safety is the principle that your advertising should not appear in contexts that damage your brand's equity. That's it. It's not about politics. It's not about censorship. It's about not paying to have your logo displayed next to content that actively harms your reputation.
When IBM's ads appeared next to pro-Nazi content, that's not a philosophical debate. That's a brand safety failure. Full stop.
The strategic calculus is simple:
X's traffic is declining. Its most engaged remaining users are increasingly polarized. Its content moderation has been gutted. Its owner is actively hostile to advertisers. And its ad targeting capabilities have degraded since most of the engineering team was fired.
So you have: declining reach, degrading targeting, hostile ownership, and documented brand safety failures. The only argument for staying is "but it might bounce back." That's not strategy. That's hope, and hope is not a media plan.
What's more interesting to me is what this signals about platform dependency in general. Brands built significant organic audiences on Twitter over a decade. Community managers built their careers there. Content strategies were optimized for the platform's unique dynamics. And then one acquisition demolished all of it.
The lesson isn't specific to X. It's universal: any audience you build on a platform you don't own is an audience that can be taken from you overnight. The brands that diversified their community building across owned channels, email lists, and multiple platforms are fine. The ones that put all their community eggs in the Twitter basket are scrambling.
I keep thinking about the meme: "You didn't build on rented land? In THIS economy?" Well. Here we are.
If your brand is still spending on X, I'd love to hear the strategic rationale that accounts for all of the above. And "our CEO likes posting there" doesn't count.