There’s a type of marginally frustrating reporting where a reporter searches social media for [insert bad thing], finds some examples of said [bad thing], and writes a story about “This Platform Allows [Bad Thing]” followed by lots of public commentary about how the platforms don’t care/don’t do enough, etc. etc.

Let me let you in on a little secret: there are more [bad things] on the internet than you can reasonably think of. If you come up with a big enough list of [bad things] to block, people will just come up with more [bad things] you haven’t thought of. People are creative that way.

These stories are a mixed bag. They are accurate but not particularly enlightening. In our latest Ctrl-Alt-Speech, former Twitter Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth and I discussed these kinds of stories a little bit. He noted companies should do more internal red teaming, but solely to prevent such negative PR hits, rather than as an actual trust & safety strategy.

However, I’m reporting on the latest from NBC because it’s about ExTwitter allowing ads on hateful hashtags like #whitepower, #whitepride, and #unitethewhite.

Elon Musk’s social media app X has been placing advertisements in the search results for at least 20 hashtags used to promote racist and antisemitic extremism, including #whitepower, according to a review of the platform. 

NBC News found the advertisements by searching various hashtags used to promote racism and antisemitism, and by browsing X accounts that often post racial or religious hatred. The hashtags vary from obvious slogans such as #whitepride and #unitethewhite to more fringe and coded words such as #groyper (a movement of online white nationalists) and #kalergi (a debunked theory alleging a conspiracy to eliminate white people from Europe).

Elon could make a reasonable response: that while this looks bad, the simple reality is that it is simply impossible to figure out every possible awful hashtag and prevent ads from running against them.

It’s easy to see a few hashtags and say “gosh, that’s awful, how could that happen,” without realizing that millions of hashtags are used every day. Even if ExTwitter came up with a blocklist of “bad” hashtags, some would still get through and eventually some reporter would find it and report on it.

But Elon or ExTwitter never gives that response, as it would involve admitting the truth about how content moderation works. Musk and his supporters have long denied this truth as part of their willful misunderstanding of trust & safety work.

In this case, it’s still noteworthy, given that Elon has publicly promised that no “negative/hate tweets” will be monetized.

Even worse, when organizations like the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters for America pointed out similar failures to live up to that policy, Musk sued both of those organizations. This now means that whenever anyone else reports on such things, it’s worth calling it out, because the clear intent of Musk suing CCDH and MMfA was to scare off more reporting.

That said, suing small non-profits with limited resources is one thing, but taking on NBC (where ExTwitter’s “official” CEO used to work) is another. NBC had called out similar failings months ago and ExTwitter didn’t sue then. So, either Musk is learning, or someone at the company realizes NBC might be tougher to sue.

Some of this style of reporting is a bit silly and show-offy, but if Elon promises no such ads and sues those who point out it’s still happening, no one should be surprised that more reporters call this out and highlight Musk’s failures.