It Always Gets Dumber: Elon Sues The Ad Coalition He Just Rejoined Because He Thinks It’s Illegal To Not Advertise On ExTwitter

Legal Issues

from the the-hypocrisy-files dept

Remember when Elon told advertisers not to advertise on ExTwitter? Remember how he told them to “go fuck” themselves? Well, now he’s suing those companies for the serious crime (he claims it might be RICO) of not wanting to advertise on his site.

Oh, and it’s even dumber than that. Because, as we detailed, just a month earlier, ExTwitter “excitedly” announced how “proud” it was to rejoin the industry coalition that Elon is now suing. And apparently, they’re staying in as a part of that coalition.

But, wait, let’s back up a bit. There’s so much stupid here that it’s easy to get ahead of ourselves.

GARM is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. It was set up by the World Federation of Advertisers in response to the horrifying mosque shooting in Christchurch, in which the killer livestreamed the attack. Around this time, the media started pointing out (sometimes fairly, though often not very fairly) that when bad stuff showed up online (terrorism, CSAM, hate) it often showed up next to big brand advertisements.

Advertisers recognized that it would do damage to their brands to keep having ads show up in that way, and they set up GARM as a way in which advertisers and social media companies might try to create some basic frameworks to minimize such a risk for advertisers. It basically creates some standards and best practices for both advertisers and social networks to do with it as they see fit (nothing is required at all).

Next up, Elon announced a plan to purchase Twitter for $44 billion claiming it was to support free speech. Then he immediately regretted it and tried to back out of the deal. When that was clearly going to fail (in spectacularly embarrassing ways), Elon switched gears and said he’d go through with the deal.

Since Elon’s conception of “free speech” from the beginning has basically been “obnoxious speech I like is protected, but speech I dislike is not,” many advertisers decided to hold back on their ad spend to protect their brands. This turned out to be wise for a variety of reasons.

The company would then swing back and forth with CEO-in-name-only Linda Yaccarino wooing advertisers to come back to the platform, only to have Elon do something stupid and push them away again.

Early on in Elon’s tenure, he got into a bit of a war of words with folks associated with GARM after they merely asked him for details of how he would deal with hate speech on the platform. At some point after taking the company over, Elon took Twitter out of GARM. However, whenever the company wanted to cozy up to advertisers, they would tout how they would comply with GARM standards.

Twitter did that in January of 2023 and again in June of 2023.

But, of course, Elon would continually fuck things up. In November of 2023, he did so by going on stage at the Dealbook conference and telling advertisers to “go fuck yourself.” He also told them “don’t advertise.”

It appears many advertisers took him up on the latter offer again (no idea if they took him up on the former offer), making life difficult for the business side in which the company has to try to attract advertisers.

Then, just last month, ExTwitter announced that it had “excitedly” rejoined GARM. Note the date on the tweet (which is still up):

A week later, Rep. Jim Jordan (as he is known to do) released a very stupid, misleading report, claiming that GARM was an antitrust violation and that it was pressuring advertisers not to advertise on conservative media. Elon, who seemed unaware that days earlier his own company had excitedly announced it was rejoining GARM, announced that he would sue GARM and its “collaborators” over their decisions not to advertise on ExTwitter.

So, basically a week after rejoining GARM “excitedly,” “free speech absolutist” Elon announced that he would be suing GARM for using their speech to tell advertisers how best to keep their brands safe, which meant that some of them chose not to advertise on ExTwitter.

And, this week, he went through with it. Even though X is a Nevada company headquartered (for the time being) in California (though with plans to move to Texas) and WFA is a Belgian non-profit with US offices in New York, Elon sued in Texas. And not just any Texas court, but the Northern District of Texas, Wichita Falls Division, where they were guaranteed to get judge Reed O’Connor, who is already hearing Elon’s SLAPP suit against Media Matters (and has already been siding with Elon despite the ridiculousness of the case).

The complaint argues that GARM and its advertising partners are engaging in antitrust behavior in convincing advertisers not to advertise on ExTwitter. But there’s quite strong precedent at the Supreme Court that says that economic boycotts related to lawful expression are protected under the First Amendment. The only cases when that’s not true is if they’re advocating for something illegal (which didn’t happen here) or the boycott is not for any legitimate purpose, but to kill a competitor.

The complaint is nonsense in so many ways, including the false claim that GARM “forces” social media companies to adhere to its standards. But that’s not true. Social media companies can choose to adopt those standards or not (and how). And, at the same time, the advertisers who are members of GARM get to choose whether or not they want to advertise on platforms that don’t adhere to those standards. No one is forced to do anything.

And, remember, Elon literally told advertisers who were concerned about these issues on ExTwitter not to advertise.

The exhibits in the complaint show a bunch of emails that repeatedly (though contrary to how they’re described in the complaint) show that GARM just acts as a facilitation organization, and advertisers all get to make up their own minds on how to deal with things.

I mean, literally in one of the exhibits, an advertiser is asking GARM’s lead, Rob Rakowitz, what to do about Twitter, and Rakowitz tells the advertiser “you may want to connect with Twitter directly to understand their progress on brand safety and make your own decisions.” That email starts out with him telling the advertiser pretty explicitly that GARM doesn’t make recommendations, and that such decisions are “completely within the sphere of each member and subject to their own discretion.”

So, the evidence that ExTwitter itself has submitted debunks the entire argument of the case. In the complaint, ExTwitter tries to play this off as GARM trying to cover its tracks after Jim Jordan had launched his investigation.

But none of this should matter. The entire crux of the case is the ridiculous belief that advertisers have no right to pull their advertisements from Twitter.

In announcing the lawsuit, Linda Yaccarino put out a laughably stupid video in which she (1) wore a necklace that said “free speech” and (2) argued that not advertising on ExTwitter was an attack on free speech (and, hilariously, on ExTwitter’s users). I mean, you can’t make this shit up:

These organizations targeted our company, and you, our users. The evidence and facts are on our side. They conspired to boycott X, which threatens our ability to thrive in the future. That puts your global town square — the one place that you can express yourself freely and openly — at long term risk. People are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is restricted.

I mean, what? Deciding not to give Elon money is somehow an attack on users of ExTwitter? Did anyone with half a brain read this through? The marketplace has rejected your terrible understanding of trust & safety, and advertisers (and users) have gone elsewhere. That’s free speech and the free market in action.

There’s no requirement that anyone advertise on your terrible platform.

And no, ExTwitter is not “the one place that you can express yourself freely and openly.” That’s the wider internet. There are many places that allow people to express themselves freely and openly, while ExTwitter has shown a frequent willingness to remove content that Elon dislikes.

Free speech rights include freedom to not associate with someone, and that’s all advertisers are doing. If the marketplace isn’t accepting of that, then, well, that’s the marketplace telling you your ideas suck.

Meanwhile, Elon continues to argue that this is not just a civil matter, but a criminal one, pretending that this might be a RICO Act violation.

Seems like as good a time as any to point to an archived version of Ken White’s (unfortunately no longer online) lawsplainer on why it’s not RICO, dammit. In this case, it is especially not RICO.

Again, it needs to be clear what’s going on here. Elon Musk told advertisers to go fuck themselves and not advertise. Many of them did so. A few of them reached out to GARM to see what people there thought about advertising on Twitter, but no official recommendations were ever made.

And somehow, that’s RICO? Or an antitrust violation?

Meanwhile, at least one other wannabe company has joined Elon in this stupid, anti-free speech crusade. Rumble, the “what if YouTube, but for assholes,” video streaming company also sued. In the same court. With the same lawyer.

The Rumble lawsuit may be even dumber. The company admits that it doesn’t care about protecting the brand safety of advertisers:

Rumble has chosen not to implement monetization policies that are based on GARM’s preferred brand safety standards. Because of this, Rumble forgoes spending significant resources on brand safety efforts, which allows it to offer advertising space at a lower price than other platforms that do invest resources in complying with restrictive brand safety standards.

It presents no evidence that GARM did anything with regard to Rumble, but just whines that whenever it’s spoken to GARM members, none of them ever decide to advertise.

Rumble has made multiple attempts to form a commercial relationship with GroupM over the years but has never received a meaningful response. In 2023 and 2024 alone, multiple members of Rumble’s sales team sent emails to GroupM seeking to have GroupM purchase advertisements on Rumble’s platform, but GroupM refused to engage with Rumble’s outreach beyond a single meeting that GroupM ended without any follow-up.

On multiple occasions since GARM’s founding, Rumble has opened a dialogue with advertisers and ad tech providers that are GARM members with the intent of selling advertisement inventory to new customers. Despite many productive early conversations, the GARM members eventually declined to purchase advertisements on Rumble.

Must be a conspiracy, huh? And not the fact that Rumble likes to platform terrible people with embarrassingly stupid views, which most brand advertisers don’t want to be within 100 yards of supporting?

The sheer entitlement of these fuckers.

Look, there are a lot of companies that don’t want to advertise with Techdirt. For one, we say things like “these fuckers.” Also, we regularly criticize companies for doing stupid shit. So, I get it. We once had a conversation with a large advertising firm that thought they would get a big telecom company to advertise on Techdirt. They then sent us an example of us trashing that company and said “I’m afraid they won’t be interested.” Fair enough.

I get why companies don’t want to advertise here, and I’m not so entitled to think I’m owed their money or that there’s some conspiracy against us.

But somehow Elon, Linda, and whoever is behind Rumble seem to think the opposite. They think that they are magically owed advertising dollars.

And, really, at this point, any advertiser would have to be absolutely crazy to keep advertising on ExTwitter. Musk and Yaccarino are saying quite clearly that stopping advertising could lead to a lawsuit. Somehow you owe it to keep advertising forever or it’s a criminal attack on ExTwitter’s ability to thrive, which apparently is guaranteed by law.

But, of course, this case might actually succeed, given that it’s in Reed O’Connor’s court, and within the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit appeals court. I fear what such a world would look like. It’s certainly not one where free speech is supported, because any such forced association is an attack on free speech. Any such concept that says that certain platforms are magically owed support is not about freedom. It’s about blatant attacks on fundamental freedoms.

Oh, and just as a final kicker, despite Yaccarino claiming that GARM was somehow a threat to all that is good and holy, she told staff today that ExTwitter remains a member of GARM as per their agreement to rejoin last month.

Filed Under: advertising, antitrust, boycotts, brand safety, elon musk, garm, linda yaccarino, rico
Companies: garm, rumble, twitter, wfa, x