Up is down, left is right, day is night. And now, to Jim Jordan and Elon Musk, clear, direct government censorship is, apparently, “free speech.”
This isn’t a huge surprise, but on Thursday, the World Federation of Advertising shut down GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, in response to legal threats from ExTwitter and Rumble, and a bullshit Congressional investigation led by Jim Jordan.
As we have detailed, GARM was setup following the mosque shootings in New Zealand, which was livestreamed. Brand advertisers were accused (arguably unfairly) of profiting off of such things, so they put together this alliance to share information about best practices on social media advertising for brand safety.
GARM was specifically a way for advertisers to set up those best practices, share them with each other, but also to share them with social media sites, to say “hey, this is the kind of trust & safety processes we expect if we’re going to advertise.”
I disagreed with GARM about lots of things, but in a free market, where there is free speech, they should absolutely be allowed to create best practices and to talk with platforms and advertisers and advocate for better trust & safety practices in order for brands to feel safe that their ads won’t show up next to dangerous content.
All of it was entirely voluntary. Advertisers didn’t have to abide by the standards, nor did platforms. This was literally just part of the marketplace of ideas. Some advertisers advocated for efforts to be made to protect their brand safety, and some platforms agreed while others, like Rumble, did not.
All GARM was at its core was advertisers using their own freedom of expression and rights of association to try to put some pressure on platforms to be better stewards, so that advertisers weren’t putting their brands at risk. You can (perhaps reasonably!) argue that they pushed too hard, or some of their requests were unreasonable, but it’s their free speech rights.
As we’ve detailed over the last month, ExTwitter had regularly used GARM’s standards to try to convince advertisers they were “safe” and officially “excitedly” rejoined GARM as a member just last month. A few days later, Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee released a blisteringly stupid and misleading report, falsely claiming that GARM was engaged in antitrust-violating collusion to punish conservative media. None of that was ever true.
However, Elon announced that he would be suing GARM and hoped that criminal charges would be filed against GARM, perhaps not realizing his own organization had rejoined GARM a week earlier and touted that relationship in its effort to attract advertisers. Earlier this week, he carried through on that plan and sued GARM for alleged antitrust violations.
The lawsuit is absolutely ridiculous. It assumes that because GARM, at times, criticized Elon’s handling of trust & safety issues, that was a form of collusion that abused its monopoly position to get advertisers to stop advertising on ExTwitter.
It is one of the most entitled, spoiled brat kind of lawsuits you’ll ever see. Not only does it seem to suggest that not advertising on ExTwitter is an antitrust violation, it assumes that the only reason that advertisers would remove their ads from the site was not due to any actions by the company or Elon, but rather that it must be because GARM organized a boycott (which, notably, none of the evidence shows they did). One thing is quite clear from all this: Elon seems incapable of recognizing that the consequences of his own actions fall on him. He insists it must be everyone else’s fault.
Indeed, the sense of entitlement shines through from those involved in this whole process.
For example, Rumble’s CEO Chris Pavlovski more or less admitted that if you turn him down when he asks companies to advertise, you would now get sued. The sheer, unadulterated entitlement on display here is incredible:
Rumble had sued GARM alongside ExTwitter, using some of the same lawyers that Elon did. When tweeting out the details to prove that these advertisers should be added to his lawsuit, Pavlovski only showed perfectly friendly emails from companies saying “hey, look, advertising on your site won’t be good for our reputation, sorry.”
That’s not illegal. It’s not collusion. It’s the marketplace of ideas saying “hey, we don’t want to associate with you.” But, according to Rumble, that alone deserves a lawsuit.
Anyway, the World Federation of Advertisers has apparently given in to this lawfare from Elon and Jim Jordan and announced on Thursday that they were shutting down GARM because of all of this.
In other words, Elon, Jordan, and others have used the power of the state, both in the form of lawsuits and congressional investigations, to browbeat advertisers into no longer speaking up about ways to keep social media sites safe for their brands.
This is the exact opposite of free speech. It’s literally using the power of the state to shut up companies which were expressing views that Elon and Jordan didn’t like.
And, so, of course, they and their fans are celebrating this state-backed censorship as a “win for free speech.” It’s ridiculously Orwellian.
This is not a “win” for the First Amendment in any way. It is, in every way, the opposite. The House Judiciary Committee, under Jim Jordan, abused the power of the state to shut up companies from talking about which sites they felt were safe for brands or what those sites could do to be better.
And, of course, a bunch of other very foolish people repeated more of this kind of nonsense, including some of MAGA’s favorite journalists, who pretend to support free speech. Ben Shapiro called it an “important win for free speech principles,” which is just disconnected from reality.
Linda Yaccarino claims it proves that “no small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized.” This makes no sense at all. No small group monopolized anything. They just tried to put in place some basic best practices to protect their brands and no one had to agree with them at all (and many didn’t).
And if Linda or Elon thinks this will magically make advertisers want to come back to ExTwitter, they’re even more delusional than I thought. Who would ever want to advertise on a platform that sued advertisers for leaving?
