Not-for-profit ad group GARM shuts down after X lawsuit

This comes just days after Musk said in a post that the company ‘tried being nice’ for two years and got ‘nothing but empty words’, adding ‘now, it is war’.

A global advertising trade group is discontinuing its responsible media initiative after Elon Musk’s X filed an antitrust lawsuit against it this week.

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) told its members that it is discontinuing the activities of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM, after “recent allegations that unfortunately misconstrue its purpose and activities have caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and finances”.

X (formerly Twitter) filed an antitrust lawsuit against multiple advertising organisations on Tuesday (6 August), including WFA, GARM and many of its members, claiming they are involved in an “illegal boycott” of the social media platform.

CEO Linda Yaccarino referenced a report from the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released last month that said GARM “likely violated federal antitrust laws” through the boycott and its members “colluded” to cut X’s revenue after Musk acquired the platform.

In her post, Yaccarino said GARM’s actions have impacted various companies and called it a “stain on a great industry”.

“This is not a decision we took lightly, but it is a direct consequence of their actions,” Yaccarino said. “The illegal behaviour of these organisations and their executives cost X billions of dollars.”

Musk was more aggressive in his discussion of this lawsuit and said the company “tried being nice for two years and got nothing but empty words”, adding “now, it is war”.

GARM was set up 2019 as a not-for-profit initiative in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, during which the killer livestreamed the attack on Facebook.

“Since its launch, GARM has enhanced transparency in ad placements on digital social media by providing voluntary and pro-competitive tools for the advertising industry,” the WFA wrote in an announcement today (9 August).

“These tools provide information to help advertisers avoid inadvertently supporting harmful and illegal content, reducing such ads from 6.1pc in 2020 to 1.7pc in 2023.”

X has had problems with advertisers since Musk took over the platform. In November 2022, global media investment company GroupM advised clients against advertising on the platform and claimed it was a “high-risk” endeavour.

There have also been reports that X has failed to tackle offensive and deceptive content, with the EU raising questions over its content moderation. Last year, IBM suspended advertising on X after a report claimed these ads were being shown next to pro-Nazi and pro-Hitler content.

Media Matters, the non-profit that published this report, is being sued by X, which claims the non-profit “manipulated” its results by using accounts that exclusively followed major brands or users known to produce certain types of content.

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Elon Musk at a media briefing in NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Image: NASA via Flickr (CC BY-NC 4.0)