It seems that Elon Musk's efforts recently to meet with community leaders and to address concerns around antisemitism have placated the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), as the organization had issued a statement today regarding X's progress and its subsequent recommendations for prospective X advertisers.
In the last weeks, the ADL saw itself in a hot seat by Musk as he claimed that the group did indeed encourage advertisers to boycott X due to the changed moderation rules of the app, which, according to the ADL, have led to more hate speech in X posts.
Musk disputed the claims of the ADL and went even further to threaten them with a lawsuit for loss of earnings brought about by their reports.
For now, though, both camps seem to have called an unofficial truce in wake of X's publicly announced efforts at amelioration and anti-hate speech.
ADL:
"We appreciate X's stated intent over the last few weeks to address antisemitism and hate on the platform. This has been useful; more needs to be done; and, as we have with other companies, in the spirit of collaboration, we are hopeful that we can continue to engage with X on this important matter."
So far, the ADL has not specified what X specifically did to counter hate speech, except for meeting with the ADL and Jewish leaders to share its efforts. X has stated that repeatedly hate speech is significantly going down on the app year-over-year. However, third-party analysis has proven the opposite. This is why ADL had criticized the company first.
Whether X has succeeded in persuading the ADL of this is unknown, though the threat of litigation does seem to have at least played a role in the ADL issuing an official statement.
Let me be clear: any notion that ADL is leading some type of boycott of X or somehow caused $billions in losses to the company, or "pulls the strings" for other advertisers, is simply not true. We were ourselves an advertiser on the platform until anti-ADL attacks started a couple of weeks ago. We now are gearing up to do so again to bring our important message about fighting hate to X and its users.
Now even the ADL is look to run ads on X again, which gives the app a big win in convincing others about its brand safety focus.
Again, X says it is doing more than ever to address hate speech, while also creating new third-party verification partnerships that will assure advertisers their ads will not appear next to potentially offensive content. X is also establishing new brand safety tiers to help companies prevent their content from appearing alongside potentially problematic content, and apparently, with all this put together, these efforts have apparently been enough to appease the ADL to feel that progress is being made in terms of hate speech issues on its platform.
This is a significant update, with Musk having heavily criticized the ADL, so it will be quite interesting to see whether it has the kind of impact on X's ad business that he seems to believe its opening statements had.