Mother Jones illustration; Anna Moneymaker/Getty
In recent weeks, in his prolific activity on X, the social network he owns, Elon Musk has shared a deepfake of Kamala Harris, calling it “amazing.” He’s shared inflammatory posts about England’s anti-immigrant riots while opining that “civil war is inevitable.” He’s fended off calls from five Democratic secretaries of state to reform Grok, X’s AI bot, after it shared false electoral information.
All of this follows years of stalling engagement on the platform and a broader decline under his ownership, as advertisers fled a site newly-receptive to racist pseudoscience, antisemitism, and restoring noxious figures’ accounts. Their departure may have been hastened by Musk advising advertisers, twice, to “go fuck yourself,” during an on-stage New York Times interview. Or it may be because Musk used his privileged position, as a study released Thursday said, to become one of the site’s mostly widely-seen purveyors of election disinformation, racking up 1.2 billion views on the subject between January and July.
But on Tuesday Musk revealed where he’d like to place the blame by announcing a lawsuit targeting two related ad industry trade groups, alleging they had worked together to “withhold” billions of dollars in advertising from X in a “coercive exercise of market power.”
“We have tried peace for two years,” Musk declared in launching the suit. “Now it is war.”
According to Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Musk “is clearly outraged at the precipitous drop in advertising dollars since he’s taken over… Instead of owning up to the fact that its the change in the content moderation policies that he’s instituted and take responsibility for that, he’s trying to point the finger.”
The attention-grabbing antitrust lawsuit accuses the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a WFA project, of engaging in an illegal group boycott against X. The suit specifically names several WFA alliance members, including CVS Health, Mars, Orsted, and Unilever.
While the WFA declined a request to comment, according to its website, GARM was founded after the Christchurch mass shooting, when the killer live streamed the attack on Facebook. “This followed a slew of high-profile cases where brands’ advertisements appeared next to illegal or harmful content,” which, the site explains, spurred the initiative’s launch. “For advertisers who have invested heavily in these platforms, the danger of seeing their brands next to harmful content has become a major issue,” a GARM FAQ, which has been pulled down in the last two days, read. “No one wants to be inadvertently funding people intent on causing damage to society.”
It’s unclear how far GARM got with such goals, but the suit has already had an effect: the WFA announced on Thursday morning that it would be “discontinuing” its GARM initiative, Business Insider reported, although it said it planned to contest Musk’s claims in court and “demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules.”
This is not the first time X and Musk have sued critics whom they say cost the company advertising dollars. In July 2023, X brought a suit against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, accusing it of orchestrating a “scare campaign” to drive away advertisers by convincing them the site was full of “harmful content.” It was thrown out in March, with a federal judge ruling X’s lawsuit had clearly been “about punishing the Defendants for their speech.” Musk also sued Media Matters over a report they produced showing ads were appearing next to neo-Nazi and white nationalist material; the company claimed Media Matters manipulated X’s algorithms to show combinations that were “manufactured, inorganic and extraordinarily rare.”
In a post on this week’s lawsuit, X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote that the company decided to sue after a July report by the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee that found “GARM and its members directly organized boycotts and used other indirect tactics to target disfavored platforms.” The report claims advertisers worked together to silence conservative, “disfavored voices like Joe Rogan” and “weaponized claims of misinformation to influence the 2020 presidential election.”
The WFA has insisted that GARM is apolitical and that its recommendations to WFA members are voluntary. “Suggestions that GARM practices may impinge on free speech are a deliberate misrepresentation of GARM’s work. GARM is not a watchdog or lobby. GARM does not participate in or advocate for boycotts,” the site reads. “GARM frameworks and tools are voluntary, intentionally broad, and individual companies are free to review, adopt, modify, or reject them.”
Twitter can’t claim it didn’t know that the WFA and GARM were concerned about its direction under Musk. In 2022, GARM and Twitter had at least two meetings on brand safety. But the House Judiciary report rejects the idea that advertisers left Twitter because of “alleged hate speech or concerns about brand safety,” claiming they did so as part of a plot to use “their marketing dollars to silence certain disfavored views.” The report concludes GARM’s work “to demonetize disfavored content” is “likely illegal under the antitrust laws and threatens fundamental American freedoms.”
William Markham, an antitrust attorney in San Diego, says the cases against GARM and WFA should probably be dismissed. “A group of private citizens, in this case private companies, are expressing their strong disapproval of a company’s speech by refusing to patronize that company,” Markham explains. “All this falls under the rubric of protected free speech.” Things would be different, Markham adds, if X could prove that the advertisers were cooperating with a rival platform to destroy it—but Musk’s suit makes no such allegation.
“This suit sits at the uncomfortable junction of antitrust law and free speech,” says Mitch Stolz, the competition and IP litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Advertisers have a First Amendment right to decide what platforms they will place their ads on, and to stop advertising on a platform if they don’t like the content their ads appear next to. On the other hand, it’s illegal under the antitrust laws for a group of competing companies to come together and agree with one another that they won’t do business with a supplier, if that agreement leads to higher prices or lower quality services.”
“If X/Twitter continues with the suit, it’ll be quite hard for them to prove that GARM and its members harmed competition, and had no legitimate reason for boycotting X,” Stolz continues. “They will probably also have to prove to the court that their safety protocols for advertisers actually are effective. And they will have to contend with some First Amendment defenses.”
All of that, he added, “will be difficult, but a win for X is not out of the question.”
One thing Musk and X have going for them stems from their decision to file the case in Wichita Falls, Texas, where it was assigned to Judge Reed O’Connor—once described by Vox as “a notoriously partisan former Republican Senate staffer, known for handing down poorly reasoned opinions giving major policy victories to right-wing litigants.” (O’Connor, who is already hearing the case Musk filed against Media Matters, owns stock in Musk’s Tesla.)
While Hauss doesn’t think the suit will go far, he described Musk’s strategy of trying “outré theories in a friendly court” as a “spaghetti test—throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.” Given the advertisers’ solid free speech claim, if Judge O’Connor concludes X’s arguments have merit, Hauss adds dryly, the decision “would involve a fair amount of legal innovation.”
