Twitter continues to lose advertisers in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover, the latest being Mondelez International, the makers of Oreo cookies.
Musk has claimed to be a major free speech proponent. In one of this first moves as Twitter’s new owner, the tech mogul slashed the moderation team. As a result, there has been a significant uptick in hate speech on the platform and it is scaring advertisers away.
“What we’ve seen recently since the change on Twitter has been announced, is the amount of hate speech increase significantly,” Mondelez CEO Van de Put told Reuters. “We felt there is a risk our advertising would appear next to the wrong messages.
“As a consequence, we have decided to take a pause and a break until that risk is as low as possible,” he added.
General Mills, United Airlines Holdings, and various automakers have also suspended advertising on the platform in a blow to Musk’s attempts to make Twitter more profitable.