Elon Musk’s X has sued a coalition of advertisers leading a boycott of the social platform, accusing the groups of conspiring to “jointly withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue.”
The lawsuit targets the World Federation of Advertisers and its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which led a boycott of the platform formerly known as Twitter after it was bought by Musk in 2022.
“Despite the fact that Company X applies the same brand safety standards as its competitors and meets or exceeds the standards set by GARM, the boycott and its effects continue to this day,” says the complaint, filed Tuesday in federal court in Texas.
X accused the coalition and several specific advertisers, specifically Unilever, Mars and CVS, of violating antitrust laws and circumventing the competitive process through the boycott.
“GARM’s brand safety standards should succeed or fail in the marketplace on their own merits, not through the coercive exercise of market power by advertisers acting collectively to further their own economic interests through commercial constraints at the expense of social media platforms and their users,” the platform argued.
Since Musk bought the platform, X has struggled to retain advertisers, who were wary of his early decisions to roll back content moderation policies and reinstate previously banned users, including former President Trump.
Several major advertisers also pulled ads from the platform in November after reports that X was running ads for mainstream brands next to pro-Nazi and white supremacist content.
Musk responded by slamming advertisers, telling them to “fuck off” – before later walking back his comments and saying they were not aimed at advertisers “as a whole.”
“We tried to be nice for two years and got nothing but empty words in return. Now it’s war,” he said in a post on X on Tuesday, later adding that “businesses that are being systematically boycotted by advertisers are strongly encouraged to sue.”
Rumble, a YouTube-like video-sharing platform popular among conservatives, has joined the lawsuit, the company said in a press release on Tuesday.
