Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog, is said to have been misleading in a report on advertising on X.
Advertisers obtain advertising messages from social medium X. The reason for this is that much of that advertising appears next to extremist content. Advertisements for a company like IBM would then appear next to a post praising Hitler. At least that’s what Media Matters, a left-leaning nonprofit and media watchdog, says it sees on the social network misleading. That is why the company is now going to court.
Media Matters reported earlier this month that company ads sometimes appear next to hateful and illegal content. For example, advertisements for Amazon allegedly appeared next to an account that glorifies Hitler, and advertisements for Nokia appeared next to a post that denied the Holocaust. After the Media Matters report, several companies withdrew their advertisements – which cost the social medium a lot of money.
Algorithm played
However, Yaccarino, CEO of the social medium, believes that the Media Matters results are misleading: the media watchdog is said to have deviously played the algorithm to show where advertisements appear. According to the top woman, the watchdog did this by only following accounts of large companies and extremists. After that, Media Matters would have reloaded the feed several times, and they would have continued to scroll for a very long time. Only by gaming the algorithm in this way could they see ads next to extremist content, Yaccarino said.
The CEO backs up that claim with figures: no real user would have seen the ads as Media Matters showed them. An Apple ad, like the one featured on Media Matters, was seen that way by only one other person. In other words: the data they have at Twitter contradicts the findings of Media Matters.
With that data, X is now going to court: by saying that advertisements appear next to hateful and/or illegal cash, Media Matters caused X a lot of damage.
