By Jessica DiNapoli NEW YORK (Reuters) - Mondelez International Inc CEO Dirk Van de Put said in a Reuters Newsmaker interview on Tuesday that the maker of Oreo cookies has pulled its ads off Twitter after Tesla Inc boss Elon Musk acquired the social media site.
By Jessica DiNapoli
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Mondelez International Inc CEO Dirk Van de Put said in a Reuters Newsmaker interview on Tuesday that the maker of Oreo cookies has pulled its ads off Twitter after Tesla Inc boss Elon Musk acquired the social media site.
“What we’ve seen recently since the change on Twitter has been announced, is the amount of hate speech increase significantly,” Van de Put said. “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 said.
Twitter last week laid off half its workforce as advertisers pulled spending amid concerns about content moderation. Automakers, General Mills Inc and United Airlines Holdings Inc are among companies halting ads.
Twitter, which has lost many members of its communications team, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Van de Put added that Mondelez, which makes Cadbury and Milka chocolates, is expecting a strong holiday season. The consumer in Europe, Mondelez’s largest market, is currently what worries him most, he added.
(Reporting by Jessica DiNapoli in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world’s largest international multimedia news provider reaching more than one billion people every day. Reuters provides trusted business, financial, national, and international news to professionals via Thomson Reuters desktops, the world's media organizations, and directly to consumers at Reuters.com and via Reuters TV. Learn more about Thomson Reuters products: