As the criticism of her hiring mounted, Ulta Beauty and Burt’s Bees, major advertisers with Teen Vogue, suspended their campaigns with the publication.

The scrutiny of her tweets has come at a time of heightened concern about violence and harassment directed against Asian Americans. On Wednesday, after eight people were killed in shootings in Atlanta, including six women of Asian descent, Condé Nast’s chief executive Roger Lynch sent a memo to the company’s staff that said 1 in 10 of its employees identified as Asian.

“Our teams, our families and our friends have all been affected by the rise in hate crimes toward Asian people and it’s unacceptable,” Lynch wrote in the memo.

McCammond had been vetted before Condé Nast hired her, and top executives including Lynch and Anna Wintour, the chief content officer and the global editorial director of Vogue, were aware of the decade-old racist tweets, Duncan said in his note on Thursday, and McCammond acknowledged them in interviews with the company.

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Although the company was aware of the racist tweets, it did not know about the homophobic tweets or a photo, also from 2011, that was recently published by a right-wing website showing her in Native American costume at a Halloween party, according to an executive who was not authorised to speak publicly. The vetting process did not turn up the additional material because it had been deleted, the executive added.

Condé Nast has reckoned with complaints of racism in its workplace and content over the past year. In June, amid the Black Lives Matter protests, Wintour sent a note to the Vogue staff, writing that, under her leadership, the magazine had not given enough space to “Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators” and acknowledging that it had published “images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant”.

Adam Rapoport, the editor-in-chief of another Condé Nast publication, Bon Appetit, resigned in June after a photo of him resurfaced on social media, drawing condemnations from the staff for an offensive depiction of Puerto Ricans.

The New York Times