Can't wait to watch this one play out. Personally, I think X is a big pain in the ass. On the other hand, it's content is certainly no worse than Instagram or Facebook. Why advertisers single this platform out seems a bit fishy to me.
Ironic that Facebook allowed several terrorist quasi organizations to have accounts but not a multitude of unwoke Americans. Not a fan of Mark's.
Elon Musk's X thinks boycotting advertisers are creating a monopoly against it
His lawsuit was joined by Rumble, a far-right social media group that works with Truth Social
By William Gavin, Quartz Media
PublishedTuesday 1:10PM
Infamously, X owner Elon Musk told advertisers ‘go f**k” themselves at The New York Times Dealbook Summit in November 2023.
Elon Musk’s X Corp. on Tuesday sued a major group of advertisers, claiming it had violated antitrust laws by coordinating a boycott against spending money in the social media platform.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas, alleges that the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) created a conspiracy that saw its members “withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from X after Musk purchased the company and rebranded it from Twitter in 2022. The group was concerned that Twitter under Musk would no longer adhere to its established brand safety standards for advertising on social media, according to the lawsuit.
“The consequence - perhaps the intent - of this boycott was to seek to deprive X’s users, be they sports fans, gamers, journalists, activists, parents or political and corporate leaders, of the Global Town Square,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote in an open letter to advertisers. “This behavior is a stain on a great industry, and cannot be allowed to continue,” she added.
GARM was established by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), a global association for advertisers. Its membership spans several agencies and includes companies like Dell, BP, Electronic Arts, IKEA, Microsoft, and Pepsico, among others. Only four of its members are named as defendants in the lawsuit and specifically criticized: CVS Health, Unilever, Orsted, and Mars.
All four companies discontinued or greatly lowered their advertising in late 2022, shortly after Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter was completed. The lawsuit says 14 or more additional GARM members stopped purchasing advertising between November and December 2022. Companies that were not GARM members also paused their advertising, including United Airlines and Volkswagen.
As X’s new owner, Musk implemented changes that weakened quality control on the platform, including ousting its trust and safety council and the removal of staffers that worked on content moderation. Many of the advertisers cited an increase in hate speech and misinformation on the social media platform.
X did not immediately adhere to GARM’s policies and rules after Musk’s takeover, although X reinstated its relationship with GARM in July, making it a member of the very group they’re suing.
Musk also fanned the fires last November at The New York Times DealBook Summit, where he infamously told advertisers to “go f**k themselves” and accused corporations of trying to “blackmail” him with advertising deals. He tried to walk back those comments in June.
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee last week ordered 40 companies involved with GARM to provide documents related to their involvement in what it calls GARM’s “corporate collusion.” A previous report from the committee provided many of the details included in the lawsuit filed Tuesday.
X is seeking damages and a permanent injunction against the WFA, citing antitrust laws. Musk on social media called for “any company who has been systematically boycotted by advertisers to file a lawsuit,” and suggested — without explaining further — that the group may be criminally liable under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
“We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words,” Musk added. “Now, it is war.”
X was joined in its lawsuit by Rumble, the right-wing video-sharing platform founded by Chris Pavlovski in 2013. Former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social joined Rumble’s ad platform in August 2022 as its first publisher. In a press release, Rumble called GARM — and its creator, the World Federation of Advertisers — an “advertising cartel.”
“Soon a cabal of advertisers and agencies will find out that they can’t arbitrarily engineer a boycott of Rumble & X,” Pavlovski wrote on X.
Comments