This week, the House Judiciary Committee released a bombshell interim staff report titled “GARM’s Harm: How the World’s Biggest Brands Seek to Control Online Speech.”
The report describes coordination by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an initiative of the world’s most powerful advertising trade association, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), to exert sweeping influence over content monetization activity in digital and broadcast media.
The trade association claims that its members represent a whopping 90 percent of the global advertising spend, or nearly $1 trillion annually. Its members represent many of America’s most powerful corporations and well-known commercial brands used daily across the globe. WFA launched GARM in 2019 to lead collaboration between entities that are normally competitors in the advertising space to address so-called “harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising.”
“GARM includes every major advertising agency holding company in its ranks,” the committee notes. GARM’s “Steer Team,” effectively a board of directors, includes major corporations that spend billions annually on advertising. GARM’s activities are supervised and endorsed by the WFA’s executive committee, which includes representatives of household name brands like L’Oréal, Nestlé, and IBM.
Successful ad placement is all about identifying the ideal match-up between content and audience interests. In some instances, advertisers will buy airtime on specific programs, and in other cases they may set an advertising budget, identify a target audience, and let the platform place their ads accordingly. For a journalist, influencer, podcaster, or any other creator, whether corporate or individual, to earn revenue from their communications, advertisers must be willing to have their products appear alongside their content. Generally, this decision would be made by a commercial entity itself or by an agency who handles their media buying.
GARM represents an effort to make such decisions at the trade association level. GARM, according to the report, sought to coordinate the behaviors of its members and partners (advertisers and ad technology companies), harnessing maximum market power on multiple fronts to keep a large share of the world’s advertising dollars away from disfavored media.
Several of the efforts detailed in the must-read full report include:
- Colluding to cut Twitter’s revenue after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Although GARM denies wrongdoing, internal communications indicate that GARM leaders advised their members against paid advertisements on Twitter after Musk acquired the platform. GARM personnel celebrated the challenges they believed they were creating for Musk through their efforts.
- Attempting to pressure Spotify into censoring podcaster Joe Rogan. GroupM, a GARM Steer Team member, threatened to halt advertising with Spotify if the platform did not take action against the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast—one of the world’s most popular shows—due to the host’s skeptical views on the COVID-19 vaccine.
- Weaponizing “misinformation” labels to limit political speech and silence consumers. In response to sentiments of individual members, GARM used its collective influence to attempt to pressure Facebook to reject campaign ads from then-President Donald J. Trump in 2020. In addition to the universal harm of attempting to limit political free speech, GARM members have also sought to use the powerful GARM auspices to have negative reviews of their products labeled as “misinformation.”
- Embedding GARM standards in new ad tech solutions. GARM invited nearly a dozen ad-tech service providers using artificial intelligence and machine learning to join GARM in order to “ensure that GARM standards are acknowledged and implemented as part of these [companies’] solutions” and broadly oversee the work product of these firms.
The report paints a picture of corporate collusion being used to harm consumers and create new, back-channel speech restrictions under the guise of concepts like “brand safety,” “transparency,” and “ris[ing] above individual commercial interest.” It represents not only ideological warfare against speakers and programmers, but disintegration of the relationship between advertisers and consumers and possible violations of federal antitrust laws.
In addition to the report, these findings were discussed in a hearing by the Committee this week titled “Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.”
“If collusion among powerful corporations capable of collectively demonetizing, and in effect eliminating, certain views and voices is allowed to continue, the ability of countless American consumers to choose what to read and listen to, or even have their speech or writing reach other Americans, will be destroyed,” the committee writes in conclusion, pledging to continue oversight of GARM and evaluate the adequacy of existing antitrust laws.
While lawmakers exercise Congressional oversight authority on corporate collusion to silence the voices of conservatives and consumers alike, NRB continues to monitor this issue and advocate for the rights, freedoms, and interests of Christian communicators.
Read the full report here and watch the hearing recording here.