A coterie of large advertisers and marketing agencies have said they will slow down or pause spending on the site out of concern that Musk laying off half the company’s workforce will hurt its ability to police hate speech and sexually explicit content, which they do not want their ads showing up next to.

The meeting was ostensibly organized for Twitter’s advertisers, with whom Mr. Musk has had a volatile relationship in his short time at the helm. He has swung from conciliatory meetings with Madison Avenue executives to threats to put them through a “thermonuclear name & shame” as some brands paused their spending on Twitter because of fears of how his ownership might change the platform’s content.

The NAACP was among the nearly 50 organizations that collaborated on an open letter last Wednesday to share their concerns with the social network’s top 20 advertisers in the U.S.

The letter came from Stop Toxic Twitter, which has since grown to more than 60 civil rights and civil society groups calling on Twitter advertisers to demand a safer Twitter for their brands and for users.

Some progressive groups said the move raised red flags, given how much power Musk has as the sole owner of Washington’s favorite platform. “A billionaire generally holding that much power and making a comment like that in the 11th hour of what is a highly contentious election is a huge problem,” said Maen Hammad, a campaigns consultant for corporate accountability watchdog group SumOfUs.

A number of advertisers have pulled back from Twitter amid growing fear that misinformation and hate speech would be allowed to proliferate on the platform under Musk’s leadership. Companies ranging from Volkswagen to General Mills to REI confirmed that they would suspend advertising on Twitter, ultimately leaving the social media platform without some of its biggest sources of revenue.

“Some brands and companies are concerned about the direction he’s taking Twitter in, but they don’t want to come out and say that publicly because they’re terrified of what he’ll say on the platform,” Gill says.

As advertisers flee Twitter, Elon Musk boldly claimed that he could sue the organizers of a boycott against the platform. The activists, however, weren’t fazed—and neither were legal experts, who scoffed at the threat.

Last week, more than 40 public advocacy groups signed onto a letter asking Twitter’s top advertisers to pull ads from the platform unless the new owner pledged to keep toxic and hateful content off the platform. Around the same time, at least nine companies—including big names like Pfizer and General Motors—stopped or suspended advertising with the company.

Earlier on Friday, Elon Musk blamed "activists" for a "massive drop in revenue" at Twitter. He claims that they are pressuring advertisers not to use Twitter.

It wasn't clear exactly who he was referring to but the BBC has just received a press release from a group called the #StopToxicTwitter coalition who say they are a group of more than 60 civil rights and civil society organisations, such as the Anti-Defamation League and Stop Hate for Profit.

They want advertisers to "stop buys on the platform in the wake of Elon Musk’s sweeping layoffs".

The purchase of Twitter by the Tesla Inc. chief executive has reportedly led to users posting racist and other harmful content en masse on the site. The groups say that among the teams that have been affected by the job cuts are those that worked on content moderation at Twitter, which they warned could further allow hate, harassment, abuse and misinformation to proliferate on the website.

Leaders of the groups who spoke to journalists on Friday — which included Color of Change, Free Press, the Anti-Defamation League and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation — said they are escalating their calls for companies to consider the possible harms to their brands, as well as to society.

Alarm is growing over how the world's richest person, Elon Musk, is changing Twitter after he spent $44 billion to buy the influential social media platform. Musk fired nearly half of Twitter's workforce in a mass layoff Friday that gutted teams dedicated to human rights, artificial intelligence ethics and combating election misinformation, just days before Tuesday's midterm election. This comes after he met with over half a dozen civil rights groups amid concerns he will let misinformation and hate speech go unchecked.

Civil rights groups including GLAAD and the Anti-Defamation League held a conference call on Friday urging other companies to abandon Twitter, saying that mass layoffs there were gutting what they described as an already anemic content moderation staff.

Even Mr. Musk acknowledged the advertising slump, tweeting on Friday morning that Twitter “has had a massive drop in revenue,” which he blamed on activist groups pressuring advertisers.

Elon Musk said that advertiser fears over content moderation on Twitter Inc. caused a “massive drop in revenue” at the platform even though no changes have been made.

The comments come after brands including Audi, Pfizer Inc. and General Mills Inc. said they planned to temporarily pause spending on the platform while they wait to see how it evolves under Musk’s leadership.

Advertisers have been suspending their use of Twitter to promote their brands following Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover of the social platform, leading to a "massive drop in revenue," the new owner tweeted Friday.

The #StopToxicTwitter coalition, a growing group of advocacy organizations and media watchdogs including Media Matters for America, Accountable Tech, and the NAACP, has urged major Twitter advertisers to push Musk to embrace content moderation or boycott the platform entirely over worries of increasing extremism and hate speech.

A coalition called Stop Toxic Twitter, consisting of more than 60 civil rights groups including the Anti-Defamation League, has urged businesses not to support Twitter given massive layoffs and Musk’s failure to take action to prevent the platform from becoming a “superspreader” of racism.

“We are witnessing the real-time destruction of one of the world’s most powerful communication systems,” Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, one of the groups in the coalition, said in a statement. “Elon Musk is an erratic billionaire who’s dangerously unqualified to run Twitter.”

The coalition, dubbed #StopToxicTwitter, consists of organizations including Media Matters, Free Press, Accountable Tech and Color of Change. Earlier this week, the coalition sent a letter to companies including Amazon, Anheuser-Busch, Apple, Capital One, Coca-Cola, Disney and Procter & Gamble to voice their concerns to Musk about what the group sees as increased hate and offensive speech on the platform.

The coalition is now urging companies to pause spending on Twitter, fearing that widespread layoffs at the company could impede the social media platform’s ability to moderate content on the site.

Twitter broke its silence on the long-rumored layoffs in a companywide memo on Thursday night, according to multiple major media outlets. The memo did not state how many of Twitter’s 7,500 employees would lose their jobs, but it said all affected workers would be informed by noon Eastern time on Friday.

By late morning, reports were emerging of entire teams being laid off, including the curation team, which helped tackle misinformation and contextualize the “Explore” page, and the machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team, which was studying algorithmic amplification. The company also reportedly laid off most of its extensive communications team.

Civil rights groups also began publicly pressuring advertisers to pause buying ads on the platform given the layoffs’ likely effect on Twitter’s content moderation capacity.

Mr Musk’s efforts to loosen Twitter’s moderation rules have caused consternation among advertisers, who fear it could lead to their ads appearing alongside hateful posts.

Twitter’s biggest advertisers, including Amazon, Apple and Coca Cola, are facing calls to boycott the social network if Mr Musk moves to “undermine brand safety”.

Non-profit groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and Media Matters wrote to Twitter’s 20 biggest advertisers, together responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising.

Musk, Twitter's sole director after disbanding the company's board, said Wednesday he met with civil society leaders, including the Anti-Defamation League, Free Press and the NAACP. "We had a productive discussion, and as Musk’s Twitter thread demonstrates, he made a few commitments," Free Press Co-CEO Jessica J. González said in a statement.

After the call with civil rights groups, Musk tweeted that users who’ve been banned from Twitter for violating its rules — a group that includes former President Donald Trump — will not have the chance to return to the platform for at least another few weeks. Prior reports suggested Musk was planning to allow people who’d been kicked off Twitter for disciplinary reasons to come back.

Musk told the group that he plans to retain and enforce Twitter’s election integrity measures, and staff will have access to the necessary tools by the end of this week, Free Press CEO Jessica Gonzalez, who was on the call, said in an interview.