To save advertisers, Musk's X platform launched the "sensitivity setting" function.

CTOnews.com, August 9, in an effort to restore the confidence of advertisers, Musk's X social media platform launched a new "sensitivity setting" feature that allows advertisers to choose which types of content their ads appear near.

X, formerly known as Twitter, was renamed after it was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022. Since Musk took over, X's advertising revenue has fallen by 50%, as many brands worry that their ads will be associated with bad content such as hate speech. In addition, monitoring organizations have repeatedly found that ads for some big brands are placed next to the content of neo-Nazi accounts, Holocaust deniers and other previously banned users.

X said that with the new tool, it would "use machine learning to reduce the adjacency of different levels of content based on the sensitivity threshold of the brand in the upcoming event."

Currently, advertisers can choose two sensitivity settings: "conservative" and "standard". The "conservative" setting excludes content that involves "targeted hate speech, sexual content, excessive blood, swearing, obscenity, spam and drugs". The Standard setting avoids the same theme, but allows spam and drug-related content. Company X also plans to introduce a "loose" setting for advertisers who want to "maximize ad coverage", which has the least restrictions on content.

CTOnews.com notes that this is not the first time that X has introduced a tool to protect its brand, and that the company has previously added some keyword-based "proximity controls" to limit advertisers' access to problematic content. But the changes do not seem to have had any impact on Company X's advertising business, and although the company has repeatedly claimed that it has succeeded in limiting the spread of hate speech on its platform, researchers have a different story. Last month, Bloomberg reported on the findings of the Anti-Digital hate Center (CCDH), which showed that hate speech has soared on the platform since Musk took over Company X, both in terms of quantity and participation. Company X disagrees and is now suing CCDH, accusing the group of "illegally" grabbing data.