Michael Kassan didn’t want to say the name, but everyone in the audience knew who he was talking about.

The chief executive of MediaLink, sitting on a panel on Tuesday with Snap Co-Founder and CEO Evan Spiegel, was recounting a recent conversation he’d had with a senior marketer who was refusing to advertise on a particular social media platform because of the chance that his brand’s ads would create negative headlines. The marketer wasn’t concerned about the ads themselves, but rather the content next to which the ads could appear. 

“You can draw [whatever] you want to what I’m referring to,” Kassan said, declining invitations from the moderator, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, to name the platform.

“Do you mean X?” Boorstin tried again.

“I do,” Kassan said, his acquiescence drawing a wave of laughter from the crowd.

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The exchange reflects one side of an overall mixed reception from marketers toward X at CES. But good or bad, its presence is drawing attention to brand and platform safety issues on social media at large, spurring these players to preach reassurance in their face time with brands.

“The thing that we’ve seen in these last five or six months is that brand safety shot right back up to the top of the chart in terms of the drinking game of our industry,” Kassan said during the keynote.

For those who see X (formerly Twitter) as a kind of Voldemort-esque, “he-who-must-not-be-named” company—thanks to owner Elon Musk’s continued controversies and divisive statements—the platform can’t shake its reputation for questionable brand safety. Snap’s Patrick Harris, president of Americas and global partnerships, said he let out a belly laugh during Kassan and Boorstin’s exchange, adding that many in the industry “probably shared” Kassan’s sentiment.

But not everyone is averse to welcoming X. At a breakfast conversation held at the Fontainebleau hotel on Tuesday morning, Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino received multiple standing ovations from attendees, according to Stagwell CEO and Chairman Mark Penn, who wasn’t present at the breakfast but heard about it from others in attendance. 

Penn, who thinks brand safety issues on social media are overblown, said that many marketers remain more interested in X than they might admit. 

It remains unclear who at X, outside of Yaccarino, is in Las Vegas trying to court advertisers. But the company is well aware that perceptions around brand safety are its biggest threat. During CES, X announced an expansion of ad control capabilities with Integral Ad Science, while also making known that it has added new hires to its brand safety team.

More platforms, more problems 

With brand safety top of mind, other social platforms at CES are hoping to show advertisers what makes them different from their polarizing counterparts.

Snap is highlighting its tools to control ad adjacency, as well as leaning into the fact that feeds—through which harmful social comparison typically manifests—have never been an important part of the platform, said Harris. This point echoes an emphasis made by Snap CEO Evan Spiegel during his keynote with Kassan, which is that Snap pre-moderates content. 

For platforms such as Instagram, moderation has become a hot-button issue amid a bevy of reports that children are made unsafe by its aggressive algorithms. And advertisers have reason to trust that the problem is serious. The Senate has summoned the chief executives at Snap, Meta, TikTok, X and Discord to a hearing at the end of the month, during which they will be questioned on online child sex exploitation. 

“The upcoming hearing is a bit of a seat-belt moment for the tech industry,” Spiegel said at the keynote.

Meanwhile, another social platform with a presence at CES is reassuring advertisers by emphasizing its relatively responsible history with brand safety, according to multiple sources familiar with these conversations, who did identify the platform. They said that advertisers are mainly anxious about today’s geopolitical context, in addition to upcoming events that could further complicate moderation of misinformation, such as the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

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Pinterest is taking aim at another brand safety issue: AI, which for all its boons also carries many risks for marketers. The platform on Tuesday emphasized its ethical AI approach to marketers, which includes using the technology to increase inclusivity, said Matt Higgins, VP of strategy at agency Blue Hour Studios. The purpose-driven focus could particularly stand out at a CES in which AI accelerationism—or the support for unfettered development of AI technology—is abundantly visible.     

While Stagwell’s Penn doesn’t buy into the full extent of the brand safety hullabaloo, he does think that tech companies have an obligation to reassure partners about their ad experiences.

“Platforms have to show brands the mechanisms and teams they’ve created,” he said.