Advertisers Urged to Stay Away from Twitter

Twitter's top ad partners are being urged by advocacy groups to boycott the platform if it lowers standards for content moderation.

The groups pressed companies including Apple, Best Buy, Coca-Cola and Verizon Communications in a letter to their chief executive officers to commit to stop advertising on Twitter if the company's new owner Elon Musk allows hate speech, misinformation and conspiracy theories to flourish on the platform.

Advertisers have both the power and the responsibility to hold him to account and they must -- not only for their own brand safety, but for the integrity of our now crumbling information ecosystem,

said Nicole Gill, co-founder and executive director of digital rights group Accountable Tech.

Accountable Tech is one of more than 40 activist organizations that signed the letter published days after Musk took control of Twitter.

After the takeover, Twitter froze some employee access to internal tools used for content moderation and other policy enforcement, Bloomberg reported.

Musk has pledged to restore the accounts of controversial figures who have been suspended from Twitter such as former US President Donald Trump.