X has long fought a battle with its top executives against advertisers who flee the platform over concerns about hate speech. The company is now taking that fight to legal ground. CEO Linda Yaccarino announced in a post on X that the company has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and some of its members, including Mars, Unilever and CVS Health.
According to Yaccarino, this group has launched an “illegal boycott” of X. “The outcome, perhaps the purpose, of this boycott was to deprive sports spectators, players, journalists, activists, parents, political and corporate leaders of the Global City Square in X,” the CEO wrote in his post.
Part of the World Federation of Advertisers, GARM was founded to create brand safety guidelines for online advertisers. The lawsuit alleges that GARM was founded “along with dozens of unaccused accomplices.” The lawsuit alleges that the group “conspired, along with dozens of unaccused accomplices, to collectively withhold billions of dollars in ad revenue from Twitter.”
GARM has not yet made a statement on the issue.
X has previously sued other groups
Musk has previously accused a group of fueling an advertiser exodus from the platform, and that group has also been sued. The company previously sued the anti-hate group Center Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which published research showing that X was not removing hateful posts shared by premium subscribers. That lawsuit was later dismissed by a judge who said X was trying to “punish” the group for sharing unsavory research. X also sued Media Matters, a watchdog group that published a report showing that X was showing ads next to anti-Semitic content.
Musk insulted advertisers last year by saying, “Go fuck yourselves.” The owner of X shared the following statement the other day: “We tried to be good for 2 years, but all we got was empty talk. Now it’s time for war.”