An influential advertising industry group said it would shut down after being sued this week by X, Elon Musk’s social media company, according to an email sent to its members.
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a non-profit coalition of major advertisers led by the World Federation of Advertisers, told its members it would cease operations two days after Musk accused the group of orchestrating a boycott against X. The lawsuit claimed that the group, known as GARM, had violated antitrust laws by co-ordinating with brands to dissuade them from spending money on the social media platform.
While the World Federation of Advertisers denied that GARM’s work had run afoul of the law, it said that the non-profit did not have the financial resources to continue operating while it fights X in court.
At X, the news that GARM would shut down was celebrated. “This is an important acknowledgment and a necessary step in the right direction,” said Linda Yaccarino, X’s CEO. “I am hopeful that it means ecosystem-wide reform is coming.”
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The dispute stemmed from Musk’s $44 billion (€40.1 billion) purchase of X, then known as Twitter, in 2022. Musk promised a new era of unrestricted speech and annulled many of the platform’s rules against hateful content and misinformation. In response, many brands pulled their ads from X, fearing that they would damage their brands by appearing alongside unsavory posts.
In the wake of Musk’s acquisition, GARM recommended that advertisers pause their spending, and several major companies, including CVS and Unilever, did so. Those two companies were also named in X’s suit.
The suit against GARM is part of a broader attempt at X to push back against efforts to study and curtail toxic discourse online.
The ripple effects of X’s lawsuits against non-profit like GARM have contributed to problems for researchers looking into extremism, disinformation and other malicious online content. Researchers say those lawsuits have helped amplify a co-ordinated right-wing campaign to paint their work as a deep-state conspiracy to censor free speech, which has chilled academic work on the subject and led to some projects being dissolved entirely. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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