“We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war,” Musk wrote on X when the lawsuit was announced.
“This decision was not made lightly, but GARM is a not-for-profit organization, and its resources are limited,” Stephan Loerke, the World Federation of Advertisers’ C.E.O., wrote to GARM’s members, according to The Times. Loerke denied that the coalition’s effort violated antitrust laws, but said that it didn’t have the money to fight a sustained legal battle.
X and its allies celebrated: “No small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized,” Linda Yaccarino, X’s C.E.O., wrote in a post. And a spokesman for the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, which had accused GARM of “starving disfavored content, or even entire platforms, of advertising dollars,” said the move was “a big win for the First Amendment.”
Musk has gotten results by suing opponents before. After X sued Media Matters, which had published research showing that ads on X had run alongside antisemitic content, several employees of the advocacy group said the legal pressure led to layoffs, The Times reports.
But X’s victory won’t necessarily endear the platform to advertisers, many of whom have continued to stay away over a rise in divisive content — including from Musk himself. “They don’t want to interact with Elon Musk, period,” Claire Atkin, a co-founder of Check My Ads, a digital advertising watchdog, told The Times.
That could end up further hurting X, which had sought to make nice with the ad industry this summer. While Musk has sought to bulk up other sources of revenue, including subscriptions, advertising still provides the bulk of the company’s top line.