Elon Musk declares war on censorious advertisers

According to its website, GARM ‘is a cross-industry initiative established in 2019 by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to help the industry address the challenge of illegal or harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising.’ The WFA is also a defendant in the lawsuit, as are GARM members CVS Health, Mars, Orsted and Unilever.

“The illegal behavior of these organizations and their executives cost X billions of dollars,” said X CEO Linda Yaccarino in an open letter to advertisers published on X. “We are compelled to seek justice for the harm that has been done by these and potentially additional defendants, depending what the legal process reveals. It's also clear that there are likely others who suffered at the hands of this activity. This case is about more than damages - we have to fix a broken ecosystem that allows this illegal activity to occur.”

X owner, Elon Musk, retweeted Yaccarino’s open letter, adding “We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war”. Yaccarino also published a video explaining the situation to X users, while the CEO of social video platform Chris Pavlovski, tweeted “Google just found out that they can't rig the search market to exclude their competitors anymore. And soon a cabal of advertisers and agencies will find out that they can't arbitrarily engineer a boycott of Rumble & X. We've joined @X to sue them, and we'll see them in court.”

Rumble’s press release on the matter adds giant advertising agency WPP to the lawsuit, thanks apparently to the GARM membership of its subsidiary GroupM. Among its hundreds of members are telcos Verizon and Vodafone. Intriguingly, X is also a member but Rumble isn’t. Neither GARM nor the WFA have published any press releases on the matter but there is one from 2022 confirming that Twitter, as X was then called, had agreed ‘tangible steps to address brand safety-related concerns’ with GARM.

X and Rumble were apparently emboldened to take this action by a report published by the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee a month ago, titled “GARM’s harm: how the world’s biggest brands seek to control online speech. The Committee then followed up with a letter sent to 40 companies, asking them to provide a full accounting of their activities as GARM members and warning them not to destroy any associated evidence.

So this is more than simply the petulant reaction of a couple of social media sites aggrieved at their failure to do as much advertising as they would like. The mere existence of GARM seems like cartel behaviour, with direct competitors colluding to influence and manipulate the wider market. ‘GARM has helped create a better media marketplace for our members – one that is safe for brands and society as a whole,’ claims its website.

Brand safety is the founding concept for GARM, which seems to be all about preventing advertiser brands from being seen alongside speech and content that they fear will damage their reputation. Companies spend millions on establishing and growing brands, so it’s completely understandable that they would seek to protect that asset.

But such a concentration of market power as this is bound to catch the attention of antitrust types. GARM, it seems, has the power to bankrupt any company that depends on advertising for its business model. Furthermore it’s completely unaccountable and uses arbitrary, subjective criteria to determine who should be boycotted. It’s easy to perceive the whole setup as a protection racket, through which GARM can impose any condition it wants on any company that seeks advertising revenue.

One of its documents, titled ‘GARM brand safety floor and suitability framework’, details the hoops platforms have to jump through to avoid being boycotted. It lists various content categories as beneath this brand safety floor, which inevitably include that handy catch-all ‘hate speech', as well as ‘excessive use of profane language’, ‘insensitive, irresponsible and harmful treatment of debated social issues’, and, of course, ‘misinformation’.

These are deliberately vague and subjective categories but, even if they weren’t, GARM would clearly still be unilaterally appointing itself the internet’s censor-in-chief. Sadly it is competing with many governments for that role, but it’s good to see the US one treating this matter with the seriousness it deserves. To what extent is it legal for brands to impose their will on the entire market in order to protect themselves? We may be finally set to find out.