Elon Musk attends the session “Exploring the New Frontiers of Innovation: Mark Read in Conversation with Elon Musk” during the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity – Day 3 in Cannes, France, on June 19, 2024.
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A global advertising group has shut down operations of a unit focused on brand safety days after Elon Musk's X Company sued the group for leading an illegal advertising boycott.
The World Federation of Advertisers confirmed Thursday that it will discontinue the nonprofit Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative. The project was launched in 2019 in part to help advertisers avoid having their promotions appear alongside content they consider harmful.
Business Insider was first to report that GARM was on its way to shutting down.
X, formerly known as Twitter, filed a federal lawsuit earlier this week against the WFA and its member companies, including Unilever, Mars and CVS Health. The lawsuit alleges that the WFA engaged in anticompetitive behavior and organized an advertising boycott that ultimately harmed X’s financial health.
In the lawsuit filed in the Northern District of Texas, lawyers for X pointed to previous allegations made by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee against GARM that the group’s activities “steal consumer choice” and “are likely to be illegal under antitrust laws.”
House Judiciary Committee spokesman Russell Day called the GARM resolution “a major victory for the First Amendment and a major victory for Speaker Jordan’s oversight work.”
After Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, a number of advertisers paused their campaigns due to what civil rights and other groups saw as an increase in hate speech and problematic content on the platform.
During a public interview last November, Musk told advertisers to “go to hell” if they tried to “blackmail” him by stopping their ad spending on X.
“The world will know that these advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail,” Musk said at the time.
Since then, X has filed lawsuits against various watchdog organizations such as Media Matters and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which have published reports on the rise of hate speech, homophobic content, conspiracies, and other inflammatory content on the site.
In March, a California judge dismissed X’s lawsuit against the California Human Rights Commission, writing: “This case is about punishing defendants for their speech.”
Robin Schruers, chief strategy officer at media marketing group Epikity, called X's lawsuit against WFA an example of “weaponized litigation” that “simply serves as a means to suppress those voices and cripple organizations” that are trying to make the web safer, especially for children.
Brands are finding themselves caught in a political battle, Schroers said. The House committee said in March it had evidence that GARM members illegally colluded to “defund conservative platforms and voices.”
Schroers said X’s lawsuit against WFA is likely to be dismissed. However, he is concerned about aggressive moves against advertisers and said the legal action is “more political in nature than fact-based.”
X did not respond to a request for comment.
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