The House Judiciary Committee released a damning report Wednesday morning detailing a corporate conspiracy to silence conservative voices, targeting Breitbart News, Joe Rogan, Twitter (now X) and others.
The committee released its report just hours before it was due to hear testimony from Unilever USA President Herish Patel and Group M CEO Christian Juhl. Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a member of the steering team of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), argues that the companies may have violated antitrust laws by trying to divert advertising dollars from conservative media outlets, celebrities and businesses that dare to put conservative viewpoints on their platforms.
“Through GARM, large corporations, advertising agencies, and trade associations have joined boycotts and other coordinated actions to monetize platforms, podcasts, news outlets, and other content that GARM and its members deem objectionable,” the report states. “This collusion can have the effect of eliminating a variety of content and viewpoints available to consumers.”
GARM is an initiative of the powerful World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and has significant market power in the advertising industry. The report, “The Harm of GARM: How the World’s Biggest Brands Try to Control Online Speech,” reveals conclusive evidence of GARM’s potentially illegal activities.
2024-07-10 The Harm of GARM – How the World’s Biggest Brands Are Trying to Control Online Speech[38] by Breitbart News On Scribd
The report also found that in recorded interviews with the committee, GARM leader and co-founder Rob Rakowitz repeatedly “provided inaccurate information” and contradicted documentary evidence obtained by the committee.
Through its vast influence, GARM is said to be involved in activities that go much deeper than its professed aim of promoting “brand safety,” dabbling in content moderation on television, social media and the internet, the report said.
GARM describes itself as “the first industry effort to bring together marketers, media agencies, media platforms, trade associations and ad tech solution providers to protect the potential of digital media by reducing the availability and monetization of harmful content online.” GARM claims to have been formed to bring greater policy transparency so companies can achieve “brand safety,” or “transparency in where their ads appear.” [are] placed [to] Mac[e] surely [advertisers] GARM seeks to avoid “inadvertently endorsing” certain content on social media platforms. To achieve this goal, GARM claims to operate in the field of “content monetization”, which it defines as “the practice of advertising-backed content and the insertion of advertisements online”. GARM denies involvement in “content moderation”, which is “the practice and determination of what content is suitable for hosting”.[,] Recommendation to[ing,] and [making] Available[le] upon [a] However, GARM is “[c]Content monetization and moderation go hand in hand, and poor moderation puts ads and advertisers at risk.[.]In other words, GARM’s monetisation efforts have the effect of influencing the content that appears online.
Documents obtained by the committee reveal the extent to which GARM worked with some of the world’s largest corporations to silence conservative media, including Breitbart News.
GARM’s internal documents provided to the committee show a clear bias that permeates GARM’s operations and favors left-leaning news sources. For example, in October 2021, Rakowitz reached out to two GroupM members, Joe Barone, managing partner of Brand Safety Americas, and John Montgomery, executive vice president of Global Brand Safety, when asked about The Daily Wire, a conservative news organization and media company founded by commentator Ben Shapiro. Rakowitz asked about GroupM’s position on The Daily Wire. Rakowitz informed the two that GARM is “explicitly nonpartisan” and will not remove people from its platform who may be at odds with GARM’s worldview. However, Montgomery explained to Rakowitz how GroupM monitors media outlets it does not support, like The Daily Wire, to find anything problematic. Specifically, Montgomery wrote to Rakowitz about how GroupM approaches unfavorable news sources:
“There’s an interesting parallel with Breitbart. We had a long discussion about whether to put them on the exclusion list before they crossed the line into blatant misinformation. We hated their ideology and bullshit, but we couldn’t justify blocking them for their false opinions. We watched them very closely, and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line.
In other words, Group M’s strategy is to ensure that news organizations are somehow “[] The purpose of the line is to keep a close eye on the store until something is found that justifies putting the entire store on a list of websites where Group M’s customers cannot advertise (an exclusion list).
Montgomery then explained his strategy for the Daily Wire to Rakowitz: “I don’t know much about the Daily Wire, but we need to watch them closely to make sure they don’t go below the GARM floor.” He also suggested extending the ban on undesirable new sources to Fox News. “If we were to [The Daily Wire] “Why not block Fox News?” Barone eventually spoke up to explain the steps Group M has already taken.[W]”The Daily Wire is on our global high-risk exclusion list, which is categorised as conspiracy theories.” But when asked by the commission in a transcribed interview whether he was in discussions with GroupM about a list of news outlets worthy of monetisation, Rakowitz denied it, insisting: “No. The only thing we’re talking about is how often we update it. We don’t get into those conversations out of compliance with competition law policy.”
One of GARM’s proposed solutions to news media advertising control was to create a system where only “legitimate news” would be funded and all advertising revenue would be diverted away from so-called “fake news sites.” To classify “legitimate news,” GARM went outside Steer Team and approached external organizations such as the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard. GDI is a UK non-profit whose “core output” is a “dynamic exclusion list.” This GDI exclusion list can be used by platforms, brands, agencies, and others to create their own exclusion lists. Although GDI claims on its website to be neutral and independent, documents reviewed by the committee suggest otherwise. Based on a 2022 study conducted by GDI, the group identified the “highest risk sites,” that is, sites that exhibited the “highest level of disinformation risk.” The 10 sites included the New York Post, Reason Magazine, Real Clear Politics, Daily Wire, The Blaze, The American Conservative, The Federalist, and American Spectator. Meanwhile, the “lowest risk sites” list included left-leaning news sources such as BuzzFeed News and The Huffington Post. NewsGuard has also come under scrutiny for using faulty fact-checks in its work, for example flagging accurate articles about a COVID-19 lab leak claim and a Gaza hospital explosion caused by a Hamas rocket misfire as misinformation. NewsGuard regularly targets conservative media outlets, allegedly with the aim of limiting advertising revenue.
The report also included evidence that GARM “instructed its members to boycott advertising on Twitter” after Elon Musk acquired the platform.
According to one GARM member, GARM has told its members:[] GARM responded to Musk’s acquisition of the company by posting “all paid advertising” on Twitter. According to an internal GARM document, GARM received calls from members to “arrange meetings to [GARM’s] “A look at the Twitter situation and the possibility of a boycott from many companies.” GARM also published a report on “Elon Musk’s [sic] The Twitter takeover provided ample opportunity to organize a boycott. GARM launched campaigns under the title “Challenge Elon Musk” and “[s]since then [Twitter was] “We’re 80% below our revenue projections.”
GARM’s concerns about Musk appear to relate to his thoughts on the New York Post’s publication of Hunter Biden’s laptop, whose author, Emma Jo Morris, is now Breitbart’s political editor.
“GARM Stair Team members expressed concern about Musk’s revelation of the truth about how Twitter had previously been used to censor Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Biden family influence tactics, and described Musk’s position as a ‘clearly partisan view,'” the committee’s report said.
A June 2024 congressional report revealed the partisan origins of the efforts to discredit the laptop story and confirmed Morris’ reporting, concluding that the CIA conspired with the Biden campaign to interfere in the 2020 election by discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Judiciary Committee report also exposed a coordinated effort by GARM to silence popular podcaster Joe Rogan over his views on COVID-19 vaccines.
At the request of its members, GARM and its Stairteam threatened Spotify for misinformation in Joe Rogan’s podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” in which Rogan expressed the opinion that young, healthy people should not get the COVID-19 vaccine. GARM acknowledged that it was acting outside the scope of its brand safety work, and accused one of its members of “being ineligible for the 2020 FDA Appeals Act.”[b]LandSafety is somewhat different on Spotify than on Facebook’s news feed because brands are not “embedded” in podcasts. In other words, companies can easily choose to advertise or not advertise on Rogan’s podcast, and therefore GARM has no right to interfere with Spotify’s decision. GARM acknowledged the antitrust implications of Rakowitz’s arrest when he told one of GARM’s members, “We can’t publicly advise all our customers to do X. That would get us in trouble for anti-competitive and collusive conduct.” To get around this issue, Rakowitz offered to “help.” [brands] Formulate [point of view] That would make the concerted action a violation of antitrust laws, even if Rakowitz mistakenly thought of the trade association members as “customers.”
It continued, “GroupM knew there were no brand safety concerns because it didn’t advertise on Rogan’s podcast, but still tried to silence Rogan’s opinions.”
The report goes on to say about threatening comments Rakowitz made to Spotify during the episode, “Rakowitz warned Spotify: ‘This is a statement supported by StairTeam, which acts as a board of directors and brings together P&G, Unilever, Mars, Diageo, the 4As, GroupM, ISBA and ANA.[.]” “
The committee hearing, titled “Complicity in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media,” is scheduled for Wednesday, July 10 at 10 a.m. ET.
Bradley Jay is Capitol Hill correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter. translator.
