Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and started turning it into a high-profile version of 4chan, he and the platform have had a rocky relationship with the advertising industry. Marketers are notoriously averse to controversy, and Musk has a real knack for shrugging it off.
Last November, of course, Musk pissed off a bunch of people when he told advertisers who were thinking of taking their content off his site that they could “fool themselves”. He made it clear that if companies or advertising managers find him or his site offensive, they should stand up and take their money 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 money elsewhere. It turns out that so much advertising money has flown away from X in the last two years that the company is in deep trouble. A recent New York Times article states that the company’s ad revenue is down 53% from where it was last year. Now, the company has announced lawsuits against a group of advertisers, some of whom pulled their content from the site following Musk’s discovery.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, is against various members of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM, a little-known coalition of major advertisers dedicated to addressing “the challenge of illegal or harmful content on social media and its advertising monetization.” Basically, GARM aims to stop companies from supporting platforms that could be problematic from a product perspective.
The new lawsuit alleges that GARM helped “boycott” X, encouraging brands to avoid it because of its controversial content and leadership. The lawsuit follows a report issued by the House Judiciary Committee, led by Conservative Freedom Caucus leader Jim Jordan, accusing GARM of violating antitrust laws in its efforts to “monetize inappropriate content in the name of product safety.” .” X’s lawsuit says that “GARM communicated to its members its concerns about Twitter’s compliance with GARM standards, resulting in” “a massive advertiser boycott.” Through this process, GARM helped “collectively capture billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from the platform, the lawsuit claims.
On Tuesday, the CEO of X, Linda Yacharrina, published a video on the site where she announced the case and made a direct address to the 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 he stated the reason for the trial.
“To put it simply, people get hurt when the marketplace of ideas is devalued and some ideas are funded as part of an illegal boycott,” Yaccarina said. “This behavior is a disgrace to the industry at large, and it cannot be allowed to continue.”
Musk was remarkably melodramatic.
“We’ve been trying to be nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words,” Musk said on Twitter. “Now it’s war.”
Suffice it to say that Musk is a busy man. Besides helping Donald Trump get re-elected as president, he is now waging a war on the industry that supports his social media platform. The funny part here is to consider that the advertisers or the organizations they represent have different popular opinions, contrary to what seems to be the possible situation: their single-minded focus on making money stops them from wanting to advertise their product on a site full of thoughts about disinformation, conspiracy theories, and porn.
Gizmodo has contacted GARM for comment.
