The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) told its business partners on Thursday that it is “discontinuing” operations just days after Elon Musk announced an antitrust lawsuit against the organization. In a post on X, Musk said, “We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words. Now, it is war.”
We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2024
Now, it is war. https://t.co/MEzH0vqz0p
GARM is a project of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) that, according to a summary on the World Economic Forum website, was created to “accelerate and advance the role that advertisers can play in collectively pushing to improve the safety of online environments.” One area of focus listed on the website is “disinformation.” GARM was created by the WFA in 2019 and claims to represent of 90% of global advertising spending.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted an article to X explaining their decision to engage in the antitrust lawsuit. The article referred to a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee report, “GARM’s (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) Harm.” She quoted from the report: “evidence obtained by the Committee shows that GARM and its members directly organized boycotts and used other indirect tactics to target disfavored platforms, content creators, and news organizations in an effort to demonetize and, in effect, limit certain choices for consumers.”
Yaccarino criticized the boycott, saying that “people are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is undermined and some viewpoints are not funded over others as part of an illegal boycott.” She detailed that the antitrust lawsuit was against GARM, as well as the WFA and several corporate members of GARM.
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) August 6, 2024
According to the Judiciary Committee report, GARM “threatened Spotify over alleged misinformation on Joe Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, because Mr. Rogan stated an opinion that young, healthy people need not receive the COVID-19 vaccine.” Likewise the report found that GARM members considered a strategy of “blocking certain news outlets like Fox News, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart News.”
The report details how GARM was behind Twitter’s falling revenue after Elon Musk purchased the company, how they “focused on political ads and alleged misinformation to influence elections,” and their ties to CISA’s (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) “government censorship.”
Joe Rogan Goes There: Says UK’s Speech Crackdown Reminds Him of Soviet Russia
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) August 8, 2024
“The fact that they're comfortable with finding people who've said something that they disagree with and putting them in a f—king cage in England in 2024 is really wild.”
The big problem now is that… pic.twitter.com/0921Whn65n
