Most ESPN accounts were inactive yesterday after Disney announced Friday that it had stopped advertising on X, formerly Twitter. Disney’s decision followed posts by platform owner Elon Musk that aligned with anti-Semitic and white power accounts. HorribleAdvertising stained Yesterday’s inactivity, highlighting that ESPN’s main account has almost 50 million followers.
While some accounts had some activity, the main ESPN account, NBA on ESPN, First shot, NFL on ESPN, ESPN+, and others haven’t posted, responded, or liked anything since at least Friday at the time of this writing. Other accounts, such as ESPN FC, ESPN College Footballand Sports Centereach published or republished once yesterday, while some, such as the Sports ESPN and ESPN PR accountThey were active throughout the day.
Disney joined other major advertisers such as Apple, Warner Bros. Discovery, IBM and Comcast/NBCUniversal. The exodus followed a report from the nonprofit Media Matters that flagged Musk’s posts, as well as advertising that appeared alongside posts celebrating the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler.
X is one of the most popular places online to discuss sports, so the closure of ESPN’s accounts could be a problem for the platform, at least symbolically. Closing ESPN’s accounts probably won’t silence discussion about sports like NFL football, college basketball and Formula 1 today, but ESPN has a large following on the platform and won’t drive traffic with its own publications.
ESPN’s silence on X does not appear to have benefited Meta’s Threads, its main account there hasn’t posted in weeks. There simply hasn’t been a good way to keep up with specific conversations about Meta alternative X. That said, Threads began testing hashtags with post counts in Australia; If that feature eventually comes to the US, it could give it a bit more of a real-time feel than the platform has had so far. Meanwhile, as HorribleAdvertising As noted in its story, the network has been active on Meta’s other platforms, Instagram and Facebook.
