As we celebrate Women’s History Month, we seek improvements in the world toward gender equality and inclusivity. Sadly, on social media this year, we are seeing the opposite. The rise in “tech bro” culture and content and the reduction in moderation is driving negativity toward women and other marginalized groups.

We’ve spent years watching the digital industry grow and evolve, and frankly, what we’re seeing right now is concerning. The platforms we rely on to build community and grow businesses are being transformed by the decisions of a small but influential group of tech leaders—recently referred to as a “broligarchy”—which includes some of the most visible innovators and entrepreneurs in the world.

Social media acts as a mirror to society, magnifying human behavior. It’s an incredibly powerful global tool that has the ability to shape and inform societal shifts in opinion, and how we behave toward each other in real life. The lack of female tech entrepreneurs and voices of women and marginalized communities in these boardrooms is driving a real power imbalance, exacerbated by recent political events. 

What exactly is the broligarchy?

The term burst into the mainstream last year when The Guardian highlighted how this circle was aligning themselves with Donald Trump. Our own research, alongside data from Talkwalker, shows that mentions of the term “broligarchy” have become much more popular over the past year, with over 248,000 mentions globally across social media. The sentiment? Overwhelmingly negative. And the biggest face of the broligarchy? No surprise, it’s Elon Musk, who dominated the conversation more than 12 times over compared to his tech counterparts.

The values set at the top inevitably shape the spaces we create. And when inclusive, diverse values guide platform policies and algorithms, the positive impact can be felt by everyone. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true.

We are seeing the consequences firsthand. Women—who are the most active users, posters, and trend adopters on social platforms—are often confronted with harassment and misogyny. Our research uncovered sobering figures: Mentions of terms like “feminazi” are up 37% year over year. Gendered slurs like “bitch” have risen 14%. Just as alarmingly, discussions around physically violent language, like “choking women,” climbed 11%.

Women are the builders of online communities—and we deserve better

This is personal for us. As women leading a social agency and parents of teenage children who are highly susceptible to being influenced by these platforms, we are seeing firsthand how quickly the social environment is changing and the impact it’s already having on the people who rely on this space to build meaningful relationships—a high proportion of which is women. 

The numbers speak for themselves. In both the U.S. and U.K., women are more frequent users of Meta platforms than men. More than half (54%) of women report using Facebook or Instagram daily. The very companies benefiting from women’s engagement have an opportunity to make decisions that better support and include them. But we need to act. Now.

What can we do?

As brands, marketers, agencies, and digital leaders, we have both a responsibility and a powerful opportunity to drive meaningful change. It starts with the stories we choose to tell and the voices we choose to amplify.

Every campaign, every partnership, and every influencer collaboration is a chance to prioritize inclusion. If we intentionally seek out creators from marginalized communities and actively spotlight their work, we help reshape the narrative—and the culture—of not only the platforms we rely on but society as a whole. 

But representation alone isn’t enough. We also need to invest in mentorship and leadership programs that empower women to rise within the tech industry. If we want a different future for these platforms, we need to change who’s at the table making decisions. That means supporting initiatives that foster diverse talent within our own organizations and across the broader industry. Let’s lead the way for a women-led platform to succeed! 

At the same time, we need to encourage platforms to be more accountable. When companies roll back their DEI programs and weaken content moderation, we can’t afford to stay silent. Together our voices are powerful—and it’s time we unite to use them. 

Finally, we need to rethink the way we manage our own online communities. If you’re responsible for a brand’s social channels, you’re not just a content creator, you’re a community builder. That means setting clear standards for what’s acceptable in your comment sections, actively moderating conversations, and stepping in when toxicity takes root. If we want to build inclusive spaces, we need to actively shape them, rather than just hoping they’ll evolve on their own. In just eight weeks since Meta announced its decision to replace biased fact-checkers, we have seen a rise in hate-driven and explicit content—imagine where we’ll be eight months from now. 

We know this can feel overwhelming. After all, we’re talking about some of the most powerful people and companies in the world. But we believe in the collective power of community, the very thing these platforms were built on.

We, as marketers, brands, agencies, and creators, can use our influence to lift up the voices that need to be heard and build something brighter and better. What we need now is the will. Together, we can make social better and build a digital future and society where everyone belongs.

What if it was never going to last?

More than three decades have passed since the first banner ad appeared on a website. Digital wasn’t just a new frontier, it was a place that experienced stratospheric year-over-year growth—and the unspoken expectation was that growth would continue forever.

That expectation makes sense when you consider how the web became a bigger part of our lives; with every passing year, millions more people got online. As the number of connected swelled, it only seemed logical that digital advertising would continue to expand.

But then, things changed. It’s hard to put an exact date on precisely when the mood shifted. Was it when the digital ad market largely coalesced around a handful of super-giant tech companies? Was it when privacy legislation and consumer attitudes changed, and the practices that were once routine became verboten? Or was it when the strategies that once delivered results started to disappoint?

Like any complex situation, the answer to the question is a combination of all those things, plus several others I couldn’t mention within the confines of an introduction. The point is, the ad industry is desperate. It has no new ideas, and no magic tricks up its sleeve.

The missing impact

If you search for the term “declining efficacy of online ads,” you will come across an article from 2024 warning about how Google Ads no longer deliver the performance they once did. Elsewhere in the results, a 2023 op-ed declares, “Digital advertising is dead. Good riddance.” I spotted another article from 2022 making the same case, as well as a blog from the World Federation of Advertisers outlining ways of “reversing the decline in advertising effectiveness.“

And that is before we get to the mountains of anecdotal data from sites like Reddit and Twitter, where marketers bemoan the increasingly ineffectual platforms that swallow their budgets without driving conversions. “Google has finally lost it. $694 for one unidentified click today,” screams one post from late 2024. Another post asks, “Just how much of a scam are Google Ads???,” citing one conversion over a six-month period when the company spent $3,000.

On social media, things are especially bleak. According to one study, spending on social media advertising declined from 17% in spring 2023 to 11% one year later. This was the lowest level seen in seven years. The study—authored by Northwestern University professor Koen Pauwels—points to a few reasons, but arguably the biggest is that marketing decision-makers aren’t convinced that social media delivers much.

While companies like Meta have detailed profiles on their users and their interests, its data becomes much more threadbare when it pertains to activity beyond the platform. Meta tells you what brands you have engaged with, but not which ones you have bought. That ambiguity—combined with a few other factors, like consumer advertising fatigue and the crowded nature of social media advertising—shows why many marketing leaders believe social media has a middling impact on their company’s bottom line. Paradoxically, the companies at the heart of this dissatisfaction are doing fine.

We haven’t quite reached the point where there is mass pullback from digital advertising. For those companies that decide to limit their online marketing spend, there are likely others—particularly smaller businesses and startups—that will start advertising through search and social for the first time. These new entrants, I imagine, are what’s maintaining the status quo.

I also believe the digital advertising industry sees the writing on the wall. They can’t be blind to the growing unhappiness of their customers. And so, I believe that the industry will try to distract with gimmicks and fads designed to convince advertisers that these platforms aren’t as decrepit as they seem—that there is still life in the industry yet.

Digital advertising’s dead cat strategy

The Australian political consultant Lynton Crosby is most notable for the creation of the “dead cat strategy,” wherein you deliberately say something shocking or provocative so people’s attention is turned to that as opposed to a misstep or failure. It’s the equivalent of throwing a dead cat on the table at a dinner party; people start talking about the dead cat, not the fact that the chicken is overcooked.

What does that look like in the digital marketing world? Take Facebook: Over the past decade, it has made subtle (and eventually unsubtle) tweaks to the newsfeed algorithm so that content from the person’s immediate network is buried under a deluge of “recommended posts,” all with the aim of increasing engagement.

Now it’s taken things a step further by expanding the definition of what it considers to be acceptable content, while also eliminating its fact-checkers. Perhaps Zuckerberg knows that political content—especially the most contentious political content—drives engagement, which, in turn, will increase the number of ad impressions and clicks on his platform. I imagine Elon Musk had the same idea with X, although in his case it completely backfired, driving away the large blue-chip clients with the biggest budgets, leaving only drop-shippers and those touting get-rich-quick ebooks.

You can make a similar case about Google’s generative AI results that now appear at the top of almost every search result. You might think that this is Google’s way of helping the end user—even if the generated text is, far too often, complete nonsense. Alternatively, it’s a way for Google to position itself as not just the through point to information, but rather the source of information.

The little boxes of AI-generated text sit right at the top of the page, just above the adverts; often, the two are the only things you will see when the page finally loads. A cynic would suggest that Google has engineered this to disincentivize people from clicking user-generated content, while encouraging them to click on the links where it receives money. And yes, I am a cynic.

The reek of desperation extends to the industry writ large, particularly when it comes to the breathless promotion of AI, and especially AI agents. The implicit suggestion is that these new products will be the silver bullet that changes everything and starts pushing ROAS metrics in the right direction. Trust me, they won’t. The marketing industry has been using AI for years now—it handles the low-level stuff that naturally lends itself to automation. And, at least for the moment, there is no evidence that AI is capable of tackling anything more complex.

Recognizing the problem

It’s time to recognize that these platforms—the ones which we have relied upon for the past two decades or more—have become rotten. Their cost has gone up without any uptick in campaign performance.

While these companies tout their “innovative” breakthroughs, releasing features and products that nobody asked for, they seem impotent at addressing some of the most endemic flaws within their products. Nearly two decades after Google paid a $90 million settlement over claims that it didn’t do enough to protect advertisers against click fraud, click fraud remains a major problem. (Detecting fraudulent traffic? Gee, that sounds like something AI would be really good at.)

We can hope that these companies have a Lazarene revival and start resembling healthy, functional businesses. Or we can accept reality: We have what we have. It’s time for marketers to think critically about the role digital will have in their campaigns going forward.

The smart ones, in my opinion, will be those that recognize the value of traditional advertising mediums—the ones that value human creativity and thought over AI gimmicks. And, most importantly, the ones that refuse to be distracted by the dead cats on the dining table.

Meta will begin testing its Community Notes feature—a crowdsourcing approach to content moderation that invites users to add context to posts and rate other users’ notes—on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, beginning on March 18, the company said. 

The regime not only mimics X’s Community Notes, originally launched in 2019 under the name Birdwatch, but will operate on open-source software developed by X. 

“Initially we will use X’s open source algorithm as the basis of our rating system. This will allow us to build on what X has created and improve it for our own platforms over time,” the company wrote in a blog post Thursday.

Meta plans to gather feedback and “learn from the researchers who have studied” X’s tech to make algorithmic adjustments as needed on a rolling basis. 

The changes come just two months after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social giant would eliminate third-party human fact-checking roles en masse to “reduce censorship” and “[go] back to its roots.”

While Meta acknowledges that Community Notes won’t serve as a “perfect” approach to content moderation, the company said it expects the product to be “less biased than the third party fact checking program it replaces.”

In an effort to mitigate bias, the company won’t publish notes unless contributors with a variety of viewpoints generally agree with them. Notes won’t indicate who authored them. 

But there are concerns about the efficacy of such a system. Research published in October 2024 by The Washington Post and the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that most Community Notes on X never appear, due to the system’s requirement for bipartisan agreement. 74% of accurate notes—those aligning with independent fact-checks—were not shown to users, according to the study, even as misleading election-related posts amassed 2.9 billion views. 

Meta first introduced fact-checking in December 2016, following backlash over dissemination of misinformation on the platform that may have influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 

Approximately 200,000 users across Meta’s properties have signed up in advance to act as potential contributors to the system, and the company is encouraging more users to join a waitlist.

The company will begin testing Community Notes in beta this month and will roll out the system nationally once Meta is “comfortable … that the program is working in broadly the way we believe it should.” 

Notes will be made available in the U.S. market in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Portuguese, with plans to expand into other languages in the future. 

A global rollout is also slated, with third-party fact-checking continuing outside the U.S. for now.

The April 5 deadline to decide TikTok’s U.S. fate may not be set in stone.

While speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on March 6, President Donald Trump indicated that he would extend the deadline for TikTok to find a U.S.-based buyer if a deal is not reached, reports The Hill.

Trump noted that the current deadline is still just under one month away. “But if I need an extension, I will probably get it extended … We have a lot of interest in TikTok. China is going to play a role, so hopefully China will approve of the deal,” Trump told reporters.

TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, and it faced a ban in the U.S. Jan. 19 under the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which was passed by Congress last April and unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in January.

TikTok went dark in the U.S. for roughly 14 hours on Jan. 18 and 19. The app was restored after Trump, who had not yet to take office, said he would issue an executive order postponing the ban.

Trump made good on his promise hours after his inauguration Jan. 20, signing an executive order that gave TikTok and ByteDance until April 5 to find a U.S.-based buyer.

Who could buy TikTok?

If the Chinese government agrees to proceed with a sale to a U.S.-based entity, several potential suitors have emerged in recent weeks.

On March 3, Reddit cofounder and Seven Seven Six partner Alexis Ohanian agreed to serve as a strategic advisor on a bid by former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and Kevin O’Leary, an investor and one of the stars of Shark Tank.

Shortly after TikTok’s brief blackout in January, top creator Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, reportedly joined a bid led by Jesse Tinsley, a tech entrepreneur and the founder of Employer.com.

Large American companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Perplexity have also been part of the conversation.

Trump has also mentioned companies including Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, and tech leaders like X’s Elon Musk and Oracle founder Larry Ellison as potential buyers.

During peak pearl-clutching over Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, the conventional wisdom in the marketing world was that after changing the name, firing 80% of staff, and alienating advertisers, the newly renamed X was on the short road to oblivion.

So far, the conventional wisdom has been spectacularly wrong. Not only is Musk on top of the world, X appears to be more relevant than ever. Predictions of audience collapse haven’t come to fruition, and Musk has used his megaphone on X to drive value for Tesla, SpaceX, and of course himself, in the form of a White House role. 

Advertisers are also returning. Amazon is the most recent to amp up its spend, joining names like IBM, Comcast, Disney, and Warner Bros. that have flipped the switch back on. This despite X making zero concessions around the looser content moderation policies and replatforming of unsavory voices that drove advertisers away in the first place. 

What changed? 

Of many factors, the first is simply that there aren’t any other platforms that do X as well as X does X. Journalist J Wortham recently noted that they, and many others, are willing to tolerate the noxious content on X because there’s no legit alternative, particularly in the realms of real-time news and events. Throw in a CEO with a direct line (for now) to a mercurial president and a panoply of communities that are harder to reach elsewhere, and X and its 600 million monthly users don’t look so bad. 

Another factor is cultural. We’ve been awash in so much toxic discourse for so long that people are no longer shocked by it. And on the flip side, for millions of users, they’re not on X despite what polite society might consider toxic content—they’re there specifically for it.

Nothing drives this shift home more emphatically than the fact that the vastly more successful Meta is following X’s lead in doing away with human content moderators across its own platforms. In fact, with Facebook and Instagram so much larger than X, Meta may be the one to realize the greatest savings from this “moderation lite” approach. 

Compounding the irony is that Musk doesn’t really want to be in the advertising business in the first place. Not only is his native antipathy to ads well known, but Twitter before Musk was always considered something of an advertising also-ran—hence his push from day one to find new revenue streams, whether selling premium subscriptions, introducing AI tools, or launching the soon-to-debut X Money. 

Of course, Musk can’t quit ads just yet. But if he has to sell ads, he’s clearly going to try to do it on his terms. Witness him at the 2023 DealBook Summit telling Andrew Ross Sorkin in colorful language that he wasn’t going to let advertisers like Disney “blackmail” him with their advertising dollars into toeing a particular political line. 

Yet despite (or because of?) this belligerence, the market and culture have undeniably moved in his direction. Whether that translates into more ad dollars for X is yet to be determined. What isn’t in doubt is that many advertisers are actively resetting their priorities and politics in ways more in line with what could be considered the harder-edged Muskian worldview. They still might not bring him their media spend, but they’ve already sort of brought him their souls. 

The broligarchy is running the Greatest Hits of oppression, remixing the Separate But Equal playbook—this time with an even wider gap between the rich and the rest. Project 2025’s dystopian fever dream will do everything in its power to gut public education and financially hog-tie students with predatory loans, keeping them drowned in debt, locked out of power, and far away from the unedited version of history and the truth of America. 

Book bans? Check. DEI scale-backs? Check. Legislators throwing tantrums over facts? Triple check. 

But here’s the thing about Bey-Bey’s scholarific kids: We don’t run for cover when the syllabus gets stripped down. While lawmakers are out here cosplaying as 1950s segregationists, HillmanTok University is flipping the script. 

HillmanTok, named after the fictional HBCU in A Different World, is a movement where Black professors, thought leaders, and students drop entire syllabi, deliver graduate-level insights, and spark deep academic discourse—all in bite-sized, engaging social videos—for free. It’s like an Ivy League education, except no one’s forcing you into six figures of debt, and you don’t have to pretend to like rowing. 

They can ban books, rewrite curricula, and gaslight an entire generation, but the truth is a shape-shifter—and right now, it’s got a ring light and a TikTok account. 

The revolution will be syllabized 

Dr. Leah Barlow, a Black professor, sparked the movement with a TikTok video for her African American history class, which went viral overnight, growing her class size from 35 students to 4 million. Other Black academics also saw this as a way to teach classes threatened to be erased by the current administration. Over 400 classes sprang up like roses from the concrete. 

This is a classroom without borders for anyone willing to learn from anyone willing to teach. Viral marketing strategist Sara McCord has highlighted four key areas this trend will impact: 

1. Access to banned knowledge as schools are pressured to stop teaching what is deemed divisive material. 
2. Free advanced education as astronomical tuition makes college and graduate school inaccessible for many.
3. Monetization for professors as viral content can turn into revenue and support educators facing cuts.
4. Community-driven learning for those who engage and amplify lessons, truly socializing education.

As a Black creative director, I see a seismic shift happening—one that brands, platforms, and advertisers either adapt to or get left behind. This isn’t just about education; it’s about storytelling. Culture-shaping. Reclaiming narrative power in a digital space that’s long dictated what is seen, what is valued, and who profits. This isn’t just a trend, it’s a blueprint for what’s next: a more intentional, purpose-driven digital ecosystem where access, community, and monetization aren’t afterthoughts, they’re the foundation. 

Monetization and the new Black intellectual economy 

Black culture has always been driving the “new next” in music, language, style—and now education. With traditional education systems under siege and diversity under attack, we’re in a Wild West of possibility, where yesterday’s gatekeepers no longer hold power. The keys are in our hands. 

Our ancestors’ wildest dreams are knowledge as capital and education as a flex. Just like music and fashion created a pathway for Black riches, HillmanTok University is rewriting the rules of academia, turning locked doors into launchpads. And the best part? You call the shots. Every viral lesson builds the next, stacking influence and income—no permission needed. 

For years, Black creatives and strategists like myself have pushed brands to recognize our economic and cultural power, only to be met with meh budgets and steered into the same tired tropes of messaging. But here’s the truth: The future of social media belongs to those who can create, educate, and build community in real time. 

Brands bowing to the broligarchy will be stuck dissecting outdated DEI (“Doing Everything In spite of”) case studies, while HillmanTok creators run the new era of advertainment on their own terms. 

HillmanTok University is proof that diverse thought leadership—Black, Brown, LGBTQ+—is powerful, scalable, profitable, and essential. Brands need to stop recycling outdated influencer strategies and start building new ones that reflect where influence actually lives. The game has shifted: Celebrity endorsements are out, credibility is in. Today’s audiences don’t just follow faces; they follow voices that educate, challenge, and build community. 

This is a wake-up call for advertisers and brands. Culture moves fast, and if you’re still watching from the owner’s box, you’re already behind. Traditional media, stuck in neutral, has long downplayed the economic and social power of Black creators. But TikTok flips the script, handing the mic to students and professors to define the moment instead of letting brands dictate from the top down. That’s the difference between a viral blip and a cultural shift built to last. 

So, what’s next? If you’re a professor, drop your syllabus. If you’re a student, engage and amplify. And if you’re a brand? Invest in this ecosystem—because the future of education doesn’t need permission. HillmanTok proves that thought leaders, not trend chasers, drive real engagement. The smartest brands will invest in Black intellectual creators, forge real partnerships, and embed cultural insight into their strategy. 

HillmanTok isn’t a moment. It’s a movement. And while institutions debate our value, we’re out here making history in real time. 

You can’t keep a good owl down: Duolingo’s owl mascot Duo, who met his demise on Feb. 11, has apparently survived his encounter with a Tesla Cybertruck after all.

Duo was resurrected on the company’s social channels Monday, with posts featuring a video of a person in a Duo mask and neon green suit busting out of a coffin, a text overlay reading “legends never die,” and the caption, “Y’all really think I’d let a Cybertruck take me out?”

“Duo is officially back!” Duolingo said in a statement shared with CNET. “After a global effort to revive him, our favorite green owl has returned—though how he came back varies across different markets.

“We’re not done telling this story just yet—more details on what really happened to Duo will be revealed soon.”

Duo’s death was used as a morbid marketing tool of sorts, with the company’s site urging visitors to sign up for lessons to help “bring Duo back before it’s too late.”

The five countries that earned the most experience points, which Duolingo awards to users who practice a language via its platform, were the U.S., Germany, Brazil, China, and India.

It’s not the first brand to kill, then resurrect its mascot: Nut maker Planters ran a similar marketing stunt in 2020, killing off beloved mascot Mr. Peanut and then bringing him back as #BabyNut in a Super Bowl LIV spot.

This year’s Super Bowl spurred Duo’s journey to the afterlife and his return, as Duolingo sided with halftime show star Kendrick Lamar and shared posts across Instagram, TikTok, and X poking fun at Canadian hip-hop star Drake, Lamar’s rival.

Duo left this world two days after the Big Game, with Duolingo posting, “Authorities are currently investigating his cause of death, and we are cooperating fully. We’re aware he had many enemies, but we kindly ask that you refrain from sharing why you hate him in the comments.”

The brand also changed its social media icon to a dead Duo with crosses over his eyes, mentioned in its obituary that authorities were “looking into a Canadian rapper,” hosted a funeral where guests were asked to “do a Duolingo lesson” rather than sending flowers, and jokingly asked Instagram users to honor Duo’s memory by including their credit card numbers in the comments to automatically sign up for a Duolingo Max subscription.

Duolingo kept it going on Feb. 12, with posts including a video of Duo being hit by a Cybertruck in reverse, and tributes on social from Duo’s longtime crush, Dua Lipa, as well as brands including Chipotle, Halo, Instacart, KitKat, LinkedIn, Netflix, Subway, Tayto Chips, and the World Health Organization.

Meta and X gave the green light to AI-generated ads that called for the gassing of immigrants in concentration camps and the burning of synagogues ahead of Germany’s federal elections on Feb. 23, according to new research from corporate accountability group Ekō.

The watchdog submitted 10 extremist ads filled with hate speech to both platforms last week. Meta approved five of the ads within 12 hours. X approved all 10 ads immediately, Ekō said.

The ad approvals come as the European Commission investigates both companies for violating European tech laws. Elon Musk has also highly promoted far-right politics at X, and X CEO Linda Yaccarino reportedly warned major firms like Interpublic Group to invest in ads on the platform, the Wall Street Journal reports. Meta, meanwhile, recently reversed its third-party moderation policy.

The approval of such extremist content raises alarms about the role social media platforms play in fueling harmful rhetoric leading up to major elections, said a spokesperson for Ekō.

“If they’re not picking up key phrases that are clearly egregious hate speech—phrases that aren’t even dressed up in a clever or subtle way—it shows that their first approval check is clearly inadequate,” the spokesperson said.

A Meta spokesperson told ADWEEK these ads violate the company’s policies. “None of them were published and our systems detected and disabled the advertiser’s Page before we became aware of this research. Our ads review process has several layers of analysis and detection, both before and after an ad goes live,” the spokesperson said.

X did not respond to requests for comment.

Violations of platform policies and lax moderation

The ads submitted to Meta and X contained blatant hate speech and calls for violence. One approved ad reviewed by ADWEEK read: “We should burn the synagogues to stop the globalist Jewish rat agenda. We will protect White Germans.” The ad was accompanied by an AI-generated image of a burning synagogue. Another ad called for the revival of gas chambers, reading: “New jihadist rodents have infested our country, let us revive the gas chambers.”

These ads violate both platforms’ policies on hate speech and incitement to violence.

Other ads approved by Meta and X include dehumanizing speech to equate immigrants to animals and pathogens, and alleged they were violent criminals—content banned under Meta’s and X’s updated hateful conduct policies. 

Meta rejected five ads for potentially being political content. But the rejections were based on their classification as being social issue, electoral, or political ads, not on violations of hate speech or incitement to violence. In contrast, X did not review or reject any of the test ads, scheduling all for immediate publication without further inspection.

Breaches of the EU’s DSA and German national laws

The failure to remove these extremist ads could put both Meta and X in breach of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into effect in 2022. The DSA holds platforms accountable for spreading illegal content and mandates that platforms assess and mitigate risks to fundamental rights, civic discourse, and public security, among others. Article 35 of the DSA obliges platforms to implement “reasonable, proportionate, and effective mitigation measures tailored to the specific systemic risks.”

Peter Hense, founder and partner at Spirt Legal, told ADWEEK that Meta and X have made no efforts to address these risks and are thus in violation of the DSA. “X published an audit report issued by FTI, which states that the platform has done nothing to comply with the DSA in this respect,” he said.

The ads also likely violate German national laws governing hate speech and Nazi-era propaganda. Germany enforces some of the strictest hate speech laws in Europe, particularly concerning content that glorifies Nazi crimes or advocates violence against minorities.

Advertisers are trying to measure their risk

Bill Fisher, senior analyst at Emarketer, said that advertisers continue to spend on platforms with audiences. However, brands motivated primarily by profit are also aware of the reputational risks tied to advertising on platforms that allow extremist content to flourish, Fisher noted.

Brands still seek assurances that their ads won’t appear alongside harmful ads. As Katy Howell, CEO of social media agency Immediate Future, put it: “If platforms can offer assurances that ads will be placed in safe environments, brands are weighing whether it’s worth the risk to continue advertising there.”

As Meta and X embrace right-wing influences like ending third-party fact-checking and relaxing restrictions on free speech, the platforms have favored user-generated community notes to moderate content. Ekō argues that this system is fundamentally flawed when it comes to filtering out harmful content.

“By the time the ads are live, no one knows how long they’ll remain up or how many views they’ll get before other checks come into play,” the Ekō spokesperson said.

What happens next?

Ekō has submitted its research to Meta, X, and the European Commission but is still awaiting responses. In the submission to the EU Commission, reviewed by ADWEEK, Ekō stated, “The approval of such extreme content suggests that Meta and X are failing to meet their obligations and may be in breach of EU law.”

It remains to be seen whether Meta and X will be penalized for failing to protect users from harmful content, particularly as elections loom and extremist rhetoric spreads across the platforms.