On August 8, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) announced that it would be “discontinuing activities” after the Elon Musk-owned social media platform X, along with video hosting platform Rumble, launched a major anti-trust lawsuit against GARM.
In its complaint, X alleges that GARM engaged in systematic boycotts of X and Rumble and used its overwhelming market power to consistently limit advertisements placed on the platforms even when it was contrary to GARM’s own economic interest.
GARM is a project of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), an association that accounts for 90 percent of all dollars spent on advertising. Read NRB’s previous article on GARM’s activities here. GARM was created in 2019 to ostensibly “safeguard the potential of digital media by reducing the availability and monetization of harmful content online” with an emphasis on “brand safety.” The term “harmful content” proved to be a sweeping catchall for dissenting political and cultural points of view.
X filed the lawsuit against GARM and dozens of large brands in the WFA in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The case is likely to be heard by Judge Reed O’Connor, a Bush appointee. Multiple Republican state attorneys general are also rumored to be preparing to launch lawsuits against GARM.
This litigation follows a bombshell report and subsequent hearing by the House Judiciary Committee that probed GARM’s biased suppression of free speech and their cartel-like boycotting practices. The eye-opening document contained accounts of GARM’s coordinated market action aimed at suppressing diverging points of view in podcasts, advertisements, news reports, and even product reviews.
The House Judiciary Report revealed that GARM used its dominance in the advertising market to try to degrade X revenue after Musk acquired the platform, with GARM personnel indicating in email correspondence that they believed their efforts were succeeding. Among other efforts, GARM also pressured Facebook to remove political ads from the Trump campaign, urged Spotify to deplatform “The Joe Rogan Experience,” and engaged in pointed surveillance of conservative news outlets like Fox News, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart in order to “find something wrong” and target the platforms with coordinated market action because they “hated their ideology.”
Additionally, GARM pushes its members to utilize biased fact-checking tools like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), both of which consistently censor mainstream conservative news outlets. For example, the “top 10 least risky” sites according to GDI are left-leaning, while the sources that are ranked as “the top 10 riskiest” news sites are right-leaning. NewsGuard exhibits similar forms of bias, ranking liberal news outlets 27 points higher on average than conservative news organizations.
The WFA CEO wrote to members that the decision to shut down GARM was “not made lightly,” citing their limited resources as a nonprofit to engage in legal warfare. However, GARM’s disintegration will neither shield the WFA from legal accountability nor diminish the scope of the WFA’s influence in the advertising world. While overwhelming public pressure and legal recourse have forced GARM to retreat for now, time will tell whether the WFA or its allies will move to reincorporate the functions of GARM under new auspices.
While GARM’s collapse is a clear victory for the House Judiciary Committee and industry giants like Musk who sought immediate legal recourse and mounted effective pressure campaigns virtually overnight, GARM is just one of numerous known (and likely unknown) corporate and nonprofit efforts to censor independent voices online under the false guise of objectivity. In the present chapter of the battle for free expression online, public pressure campaigns and direct litigation may prove the strongest weapons of war.