In an attempt to salvage the fortunes of Twitter, the company that continues to be Elon Musk's worst spontaneous purchase has sued an advertising alliance, the World Federation of Advertisers, as well as specific companies like Mars and Unilever, over a conspiracy to give the platform the cold shoulder.
This follows a hearing over alleged collusion in the Global Alliance of Responsible Media—an initiative created by the WFA that counts companies like EA, Twitch and Tiktok as its members—in the US House of Representatives last month.
In a video posted on Twitter, the company's CEO Linda Yaccarino said she was "shocked by the evidence uncovered by the House Judiciary Committee that a group of companies organised a systematic illegal boycott against X". The video has an eerily uncanny quality, full of exaggerated hand gestures and slow, deliberate speech that calls to mind someone trying to talk to a group of unruly children. "It is just wrong," Yaccarino said while dramatically pointing her finger at the screen.
Yaccarino used the video to announce the lawsuit against the WFA, GARM and four "key members" (CVS Health, Mars, Orsted and Unilever). The rest of the video paints the lawsuit as defending Twitter's users, including the audacious claim that this alleged conspiracy "puts your global town square, the one place you can express yourself freely and openly, at long term risk".
A Message to X Users pic.twitter.com/6bZOYPhWVaAugust 6, 2024
After Musk took over Twitter, he opened the floodgates and destroyed its moderation teams, turning the platform into a safe space for bigots and conspiracy theorists. In 2023, a Media Matters report revealed that Twitter had been running ads for the likes of Apple next to "pro-Nazi content". Following this, a long list of companies temporarily halted advertising on Twitter, including Sony, Warner Bros and Ubisoft. Twitter then filed a lawsuit against Media Matters, which will go to trial in April 2025.
"Media Matters set its account to follow only 30 users (far less than the average number of accounts followed by a typical active user, 219), severely limiting the amount and type of content featured on its feed," the lawsuit states. It also accuses Media Matters of altering its "scrolling and refreshing activities in an attempt to manipulate inorganic combinations of advertisements and content".
Advertisers, meanwhile, contend that they have the right to protect their brands by only advertising on platforms that don't harm them. "No platform has a right to our advertising dollar," Unilever president Herrish Patel said in a statement following last month's hearing.
The GARM initiative (a full list of its members can be found on its website) describes its role as "the forum for the creation of solutions that will improve online safety for both consumers and advertisers" and says that its goal is to create an ecosystem that will "lead to the removal of harmful content from advertiser-supported social media".
Twitter, however, claims that it meets or exceeds the safety standards specified by GARM. "We have proven our platform provides advertisers a way to showcase their brands and reach their target audiences safely, efficiently and effectively," Yaccarino said in an open letter to advertisers.
Musk's comment on the lawsuit was a bit briefer, presumably because he's busy with the task of creating superhuman gamers. "We tried peace for 2 years," he said, "now it is war".
