• by Colin Kirkland , April 16, 2024

Ad measurement platform DoubleVerify has unexpectedly confirmed a misrepresentation of X's brand-safety measurement -- now claiming a much higher rating than it had reported between October 2023 and March 2024. The error only applied to X, and may have impacted ad spending on the social messaging app.

"Specifically, DoubleVerify's dashboard incorrectly mirrored the Brand Suitability Rate for your campaign onto the Brand Safety Rate in the summary graphic in Pinnacle,” the measurement company told X, adding that the data available to DoubleVerify was accurate, but the graphics were not.

Therefore, from October 24, 2023 to March 14, 2024, DoubleVerify's dashboard showed the wrong data for X advertisers.

This resulted in a brand-safety score as low as 70% in some cases, whereas the company says X actually deserved a score of 99.9% across all campaigns on the social platform.

“This means that X's Brand Safety Rate exceeds global benchmarks for brand safety,” DoubleVerify stated.

The corrected score may come as a surprise -- not only because the error only affected campaigns on X, but because the app has had ongoing issues in the past year in terms of content moderation, including owner Elon Musk's reduction of the app's content-moderation team and pro-Nazi content appearing alongside major ad campaigns.

A huge amount of antisemitic content appearing next to ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle and Comcast's Xfinity on X was thoroughly documented by liberal watchdog group Media Matters.

After the report was issued, Musk publicly endorsed a post on X that backed an antisemitic conspiracy theory, and then sued the watchdog, alleging it falsified its research.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted that DoubleVerify's low Brand Safety Rating for X has “had a significant impact on our business,” and urges advertisers who have reduced ad spend on the app or left altogether to “reconsider.”

Yet, it is still unclear how DoubleVerify applied a random graphic visualization to supposedly reliable data.

The company says it is now double-checking its systems, “working closely with X to ensure that all future reports reflect the accurate Brand Safety performance of campaigns running on X’s platform” and “conducting a thorough review of our processes and systems to ensure the issue does not occur in the future.”