Elon Musk’s X to Brands: Advertise With Us or We’ll Sue
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As companies create AI-powered solutions, how can they ensure they're effective and trustworthy? Join IBM at the break to hear how companies can build trust in their AI with Hrithika Gunnar, IBM's General Manager for Data and AI.

Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, June 13th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. Give us your ad business or we'll sue you. Today, we're going inside a pressure campaign by Elon Musk's ex aimed at strong-arming advertisers to spend more money on the platform. Then, before you click that unsubscribe button from an annoying email you didn't sign up for, you'll want to hear how that simple click can actually make you a bigger target for scammers.

But first, late last year, companies including Verizon and Ralph Lauren received unusual messages from a company that wanted them to do business with it. Spend your ad dollars with us or we'll see you in court.

The threat, in at least some cases, worked and allowed Elon Musk's social media platform X to secure millions of dollars in ad spending. WSJ advertising editor Suzanne Vernizza and her colleagues spoke to more than two dozen people familiar with discussions like these. And she takes us inside the campaign to strong arm X advertisers that fled the platform.

Suzanne, walk us through why X was so adamant about getting advertisers to stick around and the tactics the company used to make sure that happened.

So after Elon Musk took over Twitter at the time in 2022, there was a massive exodus of clients. Brands across the country worried about the loosened content moderations that were taking place. But there were other factors as well, including uncertainty, because there was so many executives departing, especially top ad executives. So the exodus was massive. And you're talking revenue down like 50% and revenue for X, the platforms,

platform is now called, is key because it's the lion's share of the money they make. So they're doing anything they can to get advertisers to return. And they've been at it for two years and finding very little success. So they've ramped up the pressure on Madison Avenue and advertisers. Last year, they sued a bunch of advertisers and a trade group claiming that they all colluded to illegally boycott the site, which violated antitrust laws and

More recently, they actually decided to go on an even more aggressive pressure campaign and decided to start strong-arming some brands to return and basically used threats demanding that they return to the platform or they end up being sued.

And Suzanne, did you reach out to X to see what they had to say about this? The Journal reached out to X, Elon Musk and Linda Iaccarino for comment, but they didn't return calls. And a spokesman for X declined to comment for our piece. And when we think about the companies that are involved in this, it's not small companies across the country. These are big names like Verizon, Amazon, Unilever, Pinterest, Amazon.

It seems in your story, these different tactics really caught them off guard. Companies reacted differently to the threat. Some went back and some decided, you know what, we're not going back and have now been added to the lawsuit. So there's other pressure tactics that they're also doing, you know, leveraging vendors that they work with. And those vendors are obviously advertisers. So leaning on them to make sure that they spend money on X, all in the name of trying to resuscitate their business.

I want to dig into the lawsuit that's behind this pressure campaign a little bit more. What do lawyers you've spoken to say about X's claims that the advertisers colluded to boycott the platform? Although this is the claim that X is making, the advertisers and the ad trade group that's at the heart of this basically say they did not collude and they acted independently when deciding whether or not to make changes to their advertising on X.

lawyers that we've talked to said, look, an antitrust claim is going to be a really hard bar to make because it's one thing to say, you know, they boycotted X because they wanted lower rates and

In this case, if advertisers were really motivated by a desire not to be associated with X and what was happening on that platform, then that's unlikely to be an antitrust violation. Obviously, the courts are all going to decide this. But right now, that's the thing that everybody's faced with. Like, how much does this cost?

This court case, does it have legs? Where is it going to go? And what is the status of the court case at this point? A couple of months ago, X added seven new advertisers. They amended the complaint, listing a whole bunch of new ones. So it's still in the process and we're a ways off from where this actually gets to court. And some companies that pulled advertising, as you mentioned, were concerned about content moderation and unsafe content after Elon Musk resigned.

took over X, which was then known as Twitter. What has X done to alleviate those concerns? Epsys worked overtime to try and appease them. They've instituted a bunch of new ad technology tools. For instance, you can have a list that basically has keyword blocking and your ads, you know, don't have to appear near content that has those words. But at the end of the day, the one thing that people lose sight of is for an advertiser making a decision, there's so many places to spend their money today.

Twitter X, it was never a must buy. It was always down the list. And so when an advertiser is looking at this, they look and say, do they really want to risk that? And I would point out that there was, you know, the massive boycott that happened on Facebook a couple of years ago. Advertisers came off of Facebook for basically a month.

basically because they were worried about the misinformation and things that were happening on that platform. Advertisers couldn't wait to return to that platform. They ran back. And why? It's because their businesses suffered because of it. So many would argue if it really worked that well, they would go back.

It's even tougher now because we're facing economic headwinds. So the fight to claw them back is also in an environment where economically there's worries and clients aren't just spending money on every platform. That was Suzanne Vernizza, WSJ's advertising editor. Coming up, the unsubscribe button. The safe bet to try and combat an overstuffed inbox might not be as secure as you thought. We'll tell you why and what to do instead after the break.

Enterprise AI is an unstructured data problem at scale. How does generative AI address it? Rithika Gunnar, General Manager for Data and AI at IBM, explains. Think of this as emails, PDF, PowerPoint decks that sit in an organization. Generative AI has allowed us to unlock the

opportunity to be able to take the 90% of data that is buried in unstructured formats, which really unlocks a new level of driving data and insights of that data into your workflows, into your applications, which is essential for organizations as we go forward.

Here's a fact for you about those unsubscribe links at the bottom of emails. One in every 644 clicks on them leads to a potentially malicious website. That's according to security service DNS Filter. And if that information made you groan, it made me do the same. Because to me, that seemed like one of the last bastions of safety on the internet. Writer Heidi Mitchell, though, reports that harmless-looking unsubscribe button could carry risk. Heidi Mitchell, a writer,

Heidi, what kind of emails with scammy unsubscribe buttons are we talking about? Are these emails from a brand that you've actually given your address to or are they from a bad actor who's sending you to a bad link? How exactly does that work? So there's a few things. Firstly, let's just note that if it's a real company, they do have to put that click here to unsubscribe function at the bottom. And if you trust that company, you've done business with them, it's probably fine. They

Then your email provider often has a hyperlinked, they call it a list unsubscribe header. So it'll say unsubscribe and it's blue and hyperlinked. If you click on that, that's also safe because it's created by your email provider. But what the bad actors are trying to do are a couple of things. If they have a click here to unsubscribe link at the bottom and it's from some company that you don't know,

One thing they're just trying to do is getting you to click through just to see that you're somebody who engages with email, that this is a live email. And that in the future will make the sale, the legal sale maybe even, of your email address more valuable because you're somebody that responds to things.

It's essentially if you get an email from a brand you don't recognize or it's not a known entity. Is that how you know whether these links are malicious? Is that the best sort of gauge? Unfortunately, it isn't the best gauge because your identity and your data is being sold all over the place totally legally. So you may buy something from one retailer and then your email gets put on the list and it gets sold in bulk to marketers and then they buy it and then they send you these emails.

I'm sure you get many of these a day and they're not all malicious. But if they are, or even if they're not, again, the first thing they're trying to do is to see if you respond to this email. So not responding, ignoring it is a good option.

If you don't like your inbox being flooded, you can send that kind of email to spam, filter for it, and that will alleviate the problem. The second thing they're trying to get you to do is to send you out to the web where you're no longer safe, and these are bad actors, and the link that they're providing you to, it might look legitimate.

But if you really analyze the URL bar, it's not. And there they might ask you to fill in your login credentials for your Google account or your Microsoft. That is a huge red flag. There's no reason why you should be filling in your login credentials to unsubscribe.

If it's a legitimate company or if it looks like one, you can just go to the website yourself in a totally different window and then change your communication settings and you'll no longer get on their list, supposedly. I have set up my own

shopping email, basically to try to avoid the deluge of emails from brands that we get all the time. And it is fascinating how often these marketers send you emails. So you've given us a few tips how we can avoid this potential problem, but is there anything else that consumers should know about what to watch for or how to make sure they don't fall victim to this kind of scam?

The first thing you should do is keep all of your apps and everything on your computer up to date, your operating system, especially your search engines. Because if there's a vulnerability in there that hasn't been caught, unlikely, but that's a really good way to get targeted by bad actors and then all kinds of bad things can happen. Another thing that you can do is

What you do, which is create an email that you use only for subscribing to coupons and lists and getting deals. Sometimes it's like on Instagram, it'll say like, put in your email address here and then we'll send you 10% off. And then if you do end up getting spam from it, you just kill it. And then you don't use that at all. And then Apple, and actually Chrome and Firefox too, but Apple has a hide my email feature that's baked into their email. So it creates these random coupons

That was writer Heidi Mitchell.

And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Victoria Craig. Additional support this week from Melanie Roy, Jessica Fenton, and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Scott Salloway and Kristen Slee are the deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is The Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

How can companies build AI they can trust? Here again is Hrithika Gunnar, General Manager for Data and AI at IBM. A lot of organizations have thousands of flowers of generative AI projects blooming. Understanding what is being used and how is the first step. Then it is about really understanding what kind of policy enforcement do you want to have on the right guardrails on privacy enforcement.

The third piece is continually modifying and updating so that you have robust guardrails for safety and security. So as organizations have not only a process, but the technology to be able to handle AI governance, we end up seeing a flywheel effect of

more AI that is actually built and infused into applications, which then yields a better, more engaging, innovative set of capabilities within these companies. Visit IBM.com to learn how to define your AI data strategy. Custom content from WSJ is a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal News Organization was not involved in the creation of this content.