X, whose top executives have long criticized advertisers who left the platform due to concerns about hate speech, is now taking legal action against them. X has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and several of its members, including Mars, Unilever, and CVS Health, as announced by CEO Linda Yaccarino in an open letter shared on X.
Yaccarino claims that the group engaged in an “illegal boycott” of X, with the intention of depriving X’s diverse user base of the “Global Town Square.” Axios highlights that GARM is part of the World Federation of Advertisers (also named in the lawsuit) and was established to create brand safety guidelines for online advertisers. The lawsuit alleges that GARM and its members “conspired, along with dozens of non-defendant co-conspirators, to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue from Twitter.”
This is not the first legal action X has taken against groups accused by Musk of driving advertisers away from the platform. Previously, the company sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an anti-hate group that published research indicating X’s failure to remove hateful posts by premium subscribers. That lawsuit was dismissed by a judge who stated X was attempting to “punish” the group for sharing unfavorable research. Additionally, X is suing Media Matters, a watchdog group that reported X had displayed ads alongside anti-Semitic content.
“We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words,” Musk wrote in a post on Tuesday, referencing a statement he made nearly a year ago telling advertisers to “go fuck themselves.” “Now, it is war,” he declared.
Source: Engadget.com
