Elon Musk is hoping to scare advertisers into returning to X (formerly Twitter) by suing a group of advertisers who he claims concocted a plan to cost his social media company billions of dollars.
The billionaire technocrat filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM, a coalition of advertisers, media agencies, and platforms that focus on safety in media and technology, accusing them of coordinating a campaign to stop working with him. The lawsuit also targets the World Federation of Advertisers, which oversees GARM, and four of its members: CVS Health, Mars, Unilever, and Orsted.
Ever since Musk took over as the owner of X, bringing with him a rise of antisemitism and hate speech on the social media platform, advertisers have fled en masse. In November, shortly after Musk promoted a neo-Nazi talking point, Media Matters published a report saying that X had been placing ads for brands including Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to posts promoting Hitler and Nazi beliefs.
After Musk levied a profanity-laced tirade against advertisers for leaving him, he continued to elevate hate speech on X. In May, he invited neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes back to the platform after he’d been banned.
As a result, X’s revenue has taken a dive. X earned $114 million in the United States in its second quarter, a 25 percent decline from its first quarter and a 53 percent decline from the same period last year, according to documents obtained by The New York Times .
But Musk claims it wasn’t his own support of hate speech that scared advertisers away. He thinks GARM is responsible.
In the nearly two years since Musk took over, 18 companies represented by GARM stopped advertising on the platform altogether, while dozens more shrank their spending by 70 percent, according to the lawsuit. Even as X dropped the prices of its ad spots to lure advertisers back, none returned. Musk’s lawsuit argues that advertisers’ failure to come crawling back constitutes an antitrust violation.
“By refraining from purchasing advertising from X, boycotting advertisers are forgoing a valuable opportunity to purchase low-priced advertising inventory on a platform with brand safety that meets or exceeds industry standards,” the lawsuit said.
In an open letter posted by X CEO Linda Yaccarino, she cited a report published in June by the House Judiciary Committee, titled “ GARM’s Harm .”
“Evidence obtained by the Committee shows that GARM and its members directly organized boycotts and used other indirect tactics to target disfavored platforms, content creators, and news organizations in an effort to demonetize and, in effect, limit certain choices for consumers,” the report said .
“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,” Yaccarino wrote in her letter, before accusing the defendants of cheating X out of billions of dollars.
It seems that other platforms were inspired by Musk’s war on advertisers. Rumble, a right-wing video-sharing platform, signed onto Musk’s lawsuit .
“I strongly encourage any company who has been systematically boycotted by advertisers to file a lawsuit,” Musk wrote Tuesday X. “There may also be criminal liability via the RICO Act.”
Ruben Schreurs, the chief strategy officer at Ebiquity, a marketing and media consulting firm, told The New York Times that to advertisers, Musk’s claims sound “so far-fetched and frankly ridiculous.”
“To the extent that Elon hadn’t already burned all bridges and ties with the entire advertising community, I don’t see how this will get any advertisers to come back to X,” Schruers said. “It’s a last-ditch effort to force brands who don’t want to be in the cross hairs of this kind of legal action to return to the platform.”
While one might think that you can’t actually sue someone for not wanting to work with you, it doesn’t mean that Musk won’t try.
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