Redditors Accuse Amex of Sponsoring Anti-Crypto Tweets, But Proof Inconclusive

The tweet in question was allegedly circulated through Bloomberg's Twitter network "TicToc" on Oct. 11, and was reposted as a screenshot to Redditor u/Alexsayzz's thread titled "Anti-crypto propaganda... promoted by American Express," which has had 4,100 upvotes and drawn 437 comments as of press time.

As the screenshot reproduced below indicates, the tweet appears to have the hallmarks of a promoted post, and is recorded as having 42,000 views at the time the screenshot was taken.

Alleged AMEx-sponsored tweet posted to Bloomberg's "TicToc" Twitter feed.

The allegedly sponsored tweet contains a multimedia article - referring to "Estimates" from Bloomberg's energy industry research team, Bloomberg NEF - that contends the crypto industry "Is using more energy than all the world's electric vehicles."

The tweet's alleged promotion by a major card payments industry player such as Amex has been lambasted as "Propaganda" by the thread's contributors, who view Amex's position as being in direct competition with the emerging cryptocurrency sector, and therefore as having an arguably vested interest in promoting crypto-skeptical content.

A tweet containing the same multimedia article is still to be found on the TicToc feed here, dated Oct. 10, but without the "Promoted by American Express" included.

An anonymous source at Twitter has confirmed in private correspondence with Cointelegraph that the tweet in question was indeed promoted for some period, although they could not identify the sponsor.

In order to confirm whether or not the tweet was indeed Amex-promoted content, Cointelegraph used a tool Twitter provides that enables users to retrieve tweets that have been promoted by a specific account.

Entering either TicToc or Amex fails to retrieve the relevant tweet.

While the alleged sponsor of the tweet cannot be confirmed via the platform itself by Cointelegraph's methods by press time, it remains possible that the tweet in question may have been deleted, or that Twitter's transparency tool for promoted content may be unreliable and fail to comprehensively retrieve all tweets.