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The Elon-Musk owned social media platform, X, confidently claims that it harnesses industry-leading brand safety tools to ensure a positive experience for advertisers on the platform — but a quick glance at where advertisements for prominent brands actually appear tells an entirely different story.

Over the last 24 hours, a Reliable Sources review found advertisements for a cohort of major companies and organizations have appeared directly on the verified profile account of VDARE, an openly racist, white supremacist outlet that publishes some of the most vile content on the internet.

Those companies and organizations include Amazon, Samsung, the Denver Broncos, Cox Communications, STARZ, The Wall Street Journal, The Michael J. Fox Foundation, the University of Missouri, New York Waterway, Axios, Puck, Ad Age, Morning Brew, and the Asian Development Bank.

The fact that X permits a publication like VDARE to operate a verified account on the platform — giving it access to monetization and boosting its visibility to users — is in itself seriously concerning (Facebook and YouTube, for instance, have banned the outlet from their platforms). But that it apparently also believes it is appropriate to monetize the outlet's vicious hate speech says volumes not only about the company's ethics, but its supposed commitment to brand safety.

X must be well aware that it is pairing advertisements with racist content, given that the NFL made noise about this very problem last week. The league expressed concern its ads were being displayed on accounts featuring racist material, including VDARE's, following a report from the progressive watchdog Media Matters, which brought the issue to attention. 

And yet, X has taken little if any discernible action to remedy the problem. Instead, it has continued to place advertisements for some of the world's most recognizable companies directly on the account of one of the most notorious white supremacist outlets on the web.

All the while, Linda Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising boss turned X executive, has claimed publicly and privately that X has taken incredible measures to ensure advertisers don't find their brands adjacent to hate speech on the website. But those claims don't seem to hold much water, given the ugly reality of what is transpiring on X.

In a Thursday night statement, X effectively acknowledged it has more work to do to make the platform safe for brands. 

"X cares about the health and safety of the platform for all its users, advertisers and publishers, and we're accelerating products so our content partners can be removed from some in-app placements like profile and search," a company spokesperson told me.

The statement from X — rare these days — was likely a sign of how things are going behind the scenes. Some of the brands whose advertisements appeared on VDARE's account expressed strong displeasure on Thursday when they became aware of the situation. 

"Racist hate speech is completely antithetical to everything the STARZ brand stands for and we have suspended all advertising on X immediately and indefinitely," a STARZ spokesperson told me Thursday evening.

A spokesperson for the New York Waterway told me that it found the news "disturbing" and that the company had "no knowledge" of the matter and would "definitely be contacting" X about it. The representative added that New York Waterway "wants nothing to do with hate speech, and we do not want our ads near any organization or entity that promotes it."

Jon Kelly, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Puck, said that it was "obviously appalling and completely antithetical" to the company's values to advertise on VDARE's profile. Kelly said the outlet has since "enacted various measures to hopefully ensure this was the first and last time that this happens."

The University of Missouri said it does not "condone organizations that promote intolerance." Cox Communications said it was investigating the matter. And a spokesperson for the NFL pointed me to its previous statement expressing concern that its advertisements were appearing on the accounts belonging to racists.

Spokespeople for The Wall Street Journal, Axios, Morning Brew, Ad Age, The Michael J. Fox Foundation, and the Asian Development Bank either declined or did not respond to requests for comment.

That said, it is, frankly, astonishing that big companies continue to believe that the current iteration of X is a friendly corner of the web to advertise their carefully manicured brands on, when they should know full well by now that it is a chaotic platform, rife with content moderation problems.

As Lou Paskalis, a seasoned advertising executive, told me on Thursday, "Having ads run against racist and antisemitic content is the proverbial third rail for major advertisers who have enterprise-wide initiates to support diversity, to support inclusion, that are not only important to their brands but their employees and shareholders."

"A single incident of this, screen shot and circulated, undoes years of handwork," Paskalis added. "And no amount of advertising benefit would ever displace the potential risk of one incident where your ad shows up next to unsavory content."

———  BELOW THE FOLD  ———

Televising the Trump Trial: A group of the nation's largest news organizations on Thursday asked a federal court to allow video and audio access for the forthcoming Donald Trump trial in Washington, D.C.. The group of outlets — which includes CNN, ABC News, The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others — said that if a live-stream were not possible, it would at least request the court "release visual and audio recordings of proceedings at the conclusion of each day that this matter is heard in Court." Deadline's Ted Johnson has more here.

🔎 Zooming in: News organizations and transparency advocates have long been asking federal courts to allow for video and audio streams of proceedings. But federal courts have been very reluctant to provide such access, and precedent would suggest this won't happen. That said, there is growing pressure for the courts to allow for a live telecast of Trump's trial, given the extraordinary nature of a former president facing prosecution.

Mark in the Middle: Incoming CNN boss Mark Thompson is set to be a regular presence in the CNN newsroom when he officially begins as chief executive on Monday. Thompson, I'm told, has decided to largely forgo working from an office and will instead set up shop at a desk in the Hudson Yards newsroom. Thompson will still, of course, have an office. But that office has been transformed into a meeting space where the network boss can huddle for private conversations.

🔎 Zooming in: The move to reside in the newsroom, of course, stands in stark contrast to his predecessor, Chris Licht. One of the first decisions that Licht — who was fired earlier this year after a tumultuous short-lived tenure — made when he took over CNN last year was to ditch Jeff Zucker's perch on the network's newsroom floor and move his office to a non-CNN floor in Hudson Yards. That irked staffers. Thompson's reversal of that decision carries with it a strong signal that he aims to be more accessible to employees.

Lindell the Legal Liability: More bad news for MyPillow founder and former right-wing media darling Mike Lindell. Two attorneys representing the conspiracy theorist in the lawsuit brought against him by Dominion Voting Systems asked a court on Thursday to withdraw from the case, citing millions of dollars in allegedly unpaid legal fees. Lindell himself acknowledged in a phone call with CNN's Liam Reilly that he has not paid his legal fees for two to three months and said that he was not sure who will represent him moving forward. But, he told Reilly, he will not settle with the voting technology company "in a million years." Reilly has all the details here.

Apple's Angst: "Since 2017, Apple has turned down multiple opportunities to chip away at Google’s search engine dominance, according to newly unsealed court transcripts, including a chance to purchase Microsoft’s Bing and to make the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo a default for users of its Safari’s private browsing mode," CNN's Brian Fung reported Thursday. Fung noted that the newly unsealed court documents "illustrate the challenges that have faced Google’s rivals in search as they’ve tried to unseat the tech giant from its pole position as Apple’s default search provider on millions of iPhones and Mac computers." But Fung also noted "it also shows how Apple has wrestled with Google’s rise and how some at Apple yearned for 'optionality.'" Read Fung's full story here.

Sparks Fly for Swift: You knew it would be trouble. Taylor Swift continues to perform extraordinarily well at the box office, with distributor AMC Theatres announcing Thursday that her "Eras Tour" concert film has already sold more than $100 million in advanced global sales. The film, which is set to hit the silver screen on October 13, is poised to be one of the biggest movies of the year. Shawn Robbins, chief analyst for Box Office Pro, told me Thursday he thinks Swift will surpass the $100 million benchmark at the domestic box office on opening weekend. When I asked whether the film could even reach "Barbie" levels, Robbins said he "wouldn't totally rule it out if sales pick up again next week," but that "for now" it is "not quite that high." We'll see! But for now, The Wrap's Jeremy Fuster has more.

Thank you for reading! This newsletter was edited by Jon Passantino and produced with the assistance of Liam Reilly. Have feedback? Send us an email here. You can follow us on Instagram and Threads. We will see you back in your inbox next week.