That's fair. You're right: There isn't a platform in the world with zero bad content. However, were I buying ads, darned if I want them right next to a bunch of happy swastikas.
Every company will have their own threshold for tolerating that, somewhere between "not once, never" and "is there anything on here other than neo-Nazis? Oh well, here's my money." Apparently Hyundai's threshold is a bit south of Twitter's current occurrence rate.
I don't think it's about rate so much as merely proximity; after all, if a neo-nazi posts in the middle of the woods and there's no-one there to see it, did he really post?
As long as the ad is not next to the bad content, everybody's kind of happy.
There's a spectrum of whats tolerable. What you're talking to sounds like the absolute positive rock bottom minimum bar. If you can't do this, you are truly sunk & no one can possible deal with you ever.
But I also think there's a lot more in play. This isn't a binary 0 or 1 situation. There's a whole big gradient of how comfortable folks are, how palatable content is for users. A swastika two posts away from your ad is also probably, to most companies, not particularly palatable.
Yeah that's true; it's a really interesting technical challenge.
The sheer volume of shit people throw at the internet is breathtaking. Youtube / X / Meta has to auto-detect bad posts and de-revenue or delete them in time to prevent this problem.
I do think you can't really fault a platform for what the public puts on there (have you met the public!?) but it can be faulted for what it tolerates & promotes. But because it's hard to clean up all the crap in real time, platforms should be given a bit of wiggle room.
There's related though. If there's one Nazi per billion posts, one unlucky advertiser might be the neighbor. If it's one in three, that's a whole lot of unlucky advertisers.
Twitter isn't 1 in 3, clearly. But whatever number it actually is, Hyundai ended up nearer than they'd like more often than they'd like.
I worked on a scheduler for a radio platform ages ago. Home Depot demanded that their ads shouldn't air during controversial programs (they had a very long list of what constituted "controversial"). Fair enough.
One time their ad aired in the same commercial break with a 5 second promo for a program that was on their controversial list. They completely lost their shit. The company pulled their ads until we added rules to the system preventing this type of thing, which took a little while. I don't think anyone in the world cared, but they were super adamant.
Here's a study [1] detailing "how a brand’s ad adjacency to offensive content influences consumers’ perceptions, emotions, and behavioral intentions toward the brand." It might be worthwhile reading more about the topic at hand rather than dismissing it as "weird stuff", no?
> "after a sponsored post from the company appeared next to antisemitic and pro-Nazi posts."
in other words, proximity was the issue.