Congratulations to Elon Musk for successfully threatening a litigant out of business. Earlier this week, Musk sued former Twitter advertisers for failing to put aside their financial best interests and gleefully shower cash upon the man who publicly told them, “go fuck yourself.” He’s been on quite a journey from that display of hubris to crying on the courthouse steps that it should be against the law for companies not to spend money with his neo-Nazi Usenet group.
Mostly a downward financial journey.
The lawsuit is laughable garbage, asserting that advertisers have formed an illegal cartel to eradicate “free speech” when they refuse to financially tie their brand to n-word Mad Libs. His proposed solution, of course, is to force private companies to give him money.
Compelled speech is the new free speech! As opposed to protecting the freedom to express yourself free of government reprisal, Musk envisions free speech as welfare for white supremacists — an affirmative obligation to financially underwrite the people who’ve gone bankrupt in the marketplace of ideas.
“Too bigoted to fail,” if you will.
Although just because a lawsuit is flapdoodle doesn’t mean it can’t be successful… depending on how one measures success. Musk isn’t likely to convince anyone that the Sherman Antitrust Act really authorizes judicially compelled speech, but even bad lawsuits cost money to defend, and one defendant has announced that no matter how this case turns out, they will have to shut down.
“GARM is a small, not-for-profit initiative, and recent allegations that unfortunately misconstrue its purpose and activities have caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and finances,” the group said in a statement Friday. “GARM therefore is making the difficult decision to discontinue its activities.”
The group, Global Alliance for Responsible Media, also known as GARM, is a voluntary ad-industry initiative run by the World Federation of Advertisers that aims to help brands avoid having their advertisements appear alongside illegal or harmful content. GARM confirmed it is still planning to defend itself in court.
But it’s not as though the companies who joined GARM are going out of business. GARM was just a group that around 100 companies used to farm out their brand protection efforts. It was easier and more efficient to piggyback off one consultant than for every company to maintain its own team to monitor every newspaper, magazine, social media platform, TV station, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse in the world.
A bunch of companies taking advice from the same entity to perform a task is as much a monopolistic conspiracy as a bunch of companies all hiring McKinsey.
Regardless, Musk’s spirit animal Jonathan Turley saw a diabolical plot in GARM helping corporations protecting their bottom line.
[GARM Chief Rob] Rakowitz now wields massive influence over public discourse in this collaboration with corporations and groups like GDI [Global Disinformation Index]. As was done to the left during the McCarthy period, blacklisting systems are now being used to control public access to information by choking off the revenue of sites.
The current anti-free speech movement is the most dangerous in history due precisely to this sophistication and the unprecedented alliance of corporate, media, academic, and government interests.
And Boeing doesn’t buy ads in Air Disasters Weekly, what’s your point?
McCarthy was a sitting Senator waving the power of the federal government to silence anyone to the left of Franco. GARM is a bunch of soap manufacturers and candy bar companies who don’t want to piss off their customers by showing up in the middle of a spirited X debate over whether or not the Holocaust happened. Private organizations can make that choice in a society with, you know, FREE SPEECH.
And corporations do this to the left all the time! Exxon isn’t buying banner ads at Mother Jones… and that’s their right. Even with its revenue in the toilet, X still gets a lot more corporate money than organized labor newsletters. That seems a lot more like an effort to — quoting Turley — “control public access to information by choking off the revenue of sites.” And yet, again, that’s how free speech works in a market economy. No one should be stupid enough to think brands freely deciding where they spend their money is McCarthyite blacklisting.
And yet here we are with these clowns.
With GARM gone, its members will now make their own assessments about when a platform is too toxic to work with. Those individual inquiries will find the same dumpster fire that GARM did, leaving Musk right back where he started: absolutely fucking hemorrhaging revenue. Except now without even the dubious assertion that he’s a victim of some nefarious collective action.
If anything, the lawsuit should prompt more advertisers to write off X. Contrary to the idea that this is an antitrust issue, there are a lot more advertisers out there than the 100 members of GARM and all of them are watching Musk go after his former advertisers and thinking, “why on Earth would I invite this risk into my organization?”
So, again… congratulations to Elon Musk.
Earlier: Elon Musk Says Advertisers Are Doing The RICO If They Don’t Give Him Money
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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