Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and started transmogrifying it into a scaled version of 4chan, he and the platform have had a strained relationship with the advertising industry. Advertisers notably dislike controversy, and Musk is really good at courting it.
Last November, true to form, Musk offended a bunch of people and then told advertisers who were considering pulling their content from his site that they could “go fuck” themselves. He clarified that if companies or ad executives found him or his site offensive they should pull up stakes and take their revenue elsewhere.
Well, here we are, a little less than a year later, and Musk’s company is now suing a bunch of advertisers who took their revenue elsewhere. It turns out that so much advertising money has fled X over the past two years that the company is in serious trouble. A recent New York Times article claims the company’s ad revenue is down 53% from where it was last year. Now, the company has announced litigation against a consortium of advertisers, some of whom pulled their content from the site following Musk’s acquisition.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, is against various members of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM, a little-known consortium of major advertisers who dedicate themselves to addressing “the challenge of illegal or harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising.” In essence, GARM purports to dissuade companies from backing platforms that may prove problematic from a brand perspective.
The new lawsuit claims that GARM helped effect a “boycott” of X, encouraging brands to steer clear of it due to its controversial content and leadership. The suit follows on the heels of a report released by the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, chaired by conservative Freedom Caucus leader Jim Jordan, which accuses GARM of violating anti-trust laws in its efforts to “demonetize disfavored content in the name of brand safety.” The X lawsuit claims that “GARM conveyed to its members its concerns about Twitter’s compliance with GARM’s standards, triggering” a “massive advertiser boycott.” Through this process, GARM helped “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from the platform, the lawsuit claims.
On Tuesday, X’s CEO, Linda Yacharrina, published a video to the platform in which she announced the litigation and made a direct address to advertisers.
A Message to X Users pic.twitter.com/6bZOYPhWVa
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) August 6, 2024
Yaccarina also published an “open letter” to advertisers, in which she laid out the reasoning behind the lawsuit.
“To put it simply, people are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is undermined and some viewpoints are not funded over others as part of an illegal boycott,” Yaccarina said. “This behavior is a stain on a great industry, and cannot be allowed to continue.”
Musk was notably more melodramatic.
“We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words,” Musk tweeted. “Now it’s war.”
Suffice it to say that Musk is a busy man. In addition to helping Donald Trump get re-elected as president, he is also now waging a war on the industry that funds his social media platform. The funny part here is the presumption that advertisers or the corporations they represent have any distinct ideological preference, as opposed to what seems like the more likely scenario: their singleminded focus on making money dissuades them from wanting to promote their product on a site that is overrun by musings on disinformation, conspiracy theories, and porn.
Gizmodo reached out to GARM for comment.
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