World Federation of Advertisers discontinues small brand safety initiative after Elon Musk’s X sues

NEW YORK — A small brand safety initiative is ceasing operations — days after being targeted by social media platform X in a lawsuit alleging the group helped coordinate a “massive advertiser boycott” after billionaire Elon Musk bought the company in 2022.

The World Federation of Advertisers has confirmed that it’s discontinuing its Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative. In a Friday statement, the advertising group said that recent allegations “unfortunately misconstrue (GARM’s) purpose and activities” — adding that this “caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and finances.”

X, formerly Twitter, sued the World Federation of Advertisers and member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted on Tuesday. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas, took particular aim at GARM’s alleged role that X says contributed to an advertising pause after Musk acquired the company for $44 billion in October 2022.

X alleged that advertisers conspired with and through GARM “to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from the company. The suit also alleges that the defendants violated antitrust laws in the process, citing recent findings from the Republican-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

“No small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized,” X Ceo Linda Yaccarino wrote on the platform Thursday, in response to a post from the Judiciary Committee GOP that celebrated the news of GARM discontinuing operations. She called the move a “necessary step in the right direction.”

GARM’s end may mark a victory for X right now, but the company could still face a lengthy battle in court with the group of advertisers it’s sued. And whether any of GARM’s digital safety work will continue through the larger World Federation of Advertisers organization was not immediately clear.

GARM was founded in 2019. The initiative was employed by a small team of two, a spokesperson for the World Federation of Advertisers confirmed to The Associated Press.

Since its launch, the group noted in its Friday announcement, GARM worked to enhance transparency in social media ad placements by providing voluntary tools “to help advertisers avoid inadvertently supporting harmful and illegal content.” This helped reduce such ads from 6.1% in 2020 to 1.7% in 2023, the World Federation of Advertisers said.

This week’s lawsuit from X center on the early days of Musk’s takeover of the platform formerly known as Twitter, and not a more recent dispute with advertisers that came a year later. In November 2023, a number of advertisers began fleeing X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site overall.

Musk later said those advertisers were engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away. He’s since attempted to walk back those comments some.