Hundreds of advertisements published on the social network X over the past two years used targeting criteria based on political opinions, religion or even the sexual identity of French citizens in a way that was likely illegal, according to a report published by the European non-governmental organization AI Forensics on Wednesday, June 18.
X (formerly Twitter) allows advertisers to set up their ads according to users’ interests. For example, an ad using the keyword “pizza” will be shown to people who have used this term in their posts, liked messages containing it or participated in related discussions. Conversely, an advertiser can also choose to exclude certain keywords from their ad targeting – such as the names of rival football clubs when promoting a football team.
This practice is common and perfectly legal, as long as, in Europe, it does not make use of certain criteria that are considered particularly sensitive, such as users’ political opinions or sexual orientations, and the collection and use of such data are strictly regulated. A decision by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), which was made public in 2024, found that recipients of these ads could not properly give their consent for the use of this information, which violates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the major piece of legislation that governs privacy protection within the European Union.
However, analysis of X’s advertising library archives – which must be made available under the European Digital Services Act (DSA) – showed that multiple companies used such targeting criteria between 2023 and 2025.
Racist, misogynistic or lesbophobic keywords
For example, TotalEnergies used an especially extensive list of excluded keywords for 86 advertisements, which were displayed a total of 86 million times. The list included environmental organizations (Greenpeace, WWF), climate activists (Greta Thunberg) and elected officials from the Greens party (Marie Toussaint, Yannick Jadot and others). This likely made the oil group’s ads virtually invisible to users interested in environmentalism. When contacted, the company did not respond to Le Monde‘s request for comment.
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