The influential advertising coalition known as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) announced their dissolution on Thursday after facing multiple lawsuits from social media companies accusing the group of censoring conservatives, Business Insider reported.
The World Federation of Advertisers, who established GARM, told its employees that they would be “discontinuing” the advertising group, saying the decision was “not made lightly,” according to Business Insider. The decision came after tech platforms X and Rumble both filed separate lawsuits against GARM for allegedly colluding with advertising agencies to withhold monetization from conservative outlets and other “disfavored platforms” on Tuesday.
“GARM is a small, not-for-profit initiative, and recent allegations that unfortunately misconstrue its purpose and activities have caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and finances,” GARM said in a statement on Friday. “GARM therefore is making the difficult decision to discontinue its activities.”
#BREAKING: The “Global Alliance for Responsible Media” is discontinuing.
Big win for the First Amendment.
Big win for oversight.
— House Judiciary GOP
(@JudiciaryGOP) August 8, 2024
The House Judiciary Committee released a report in July regarding GARM’s “collusion” against online speech they deemed “not appropriate” for advertisers. The Committee alleged that GARM and its members “directly organized boycotts and used other indirect tactics to target disfavored platforms, content creators, and news organizations in an effort to demonetize and, in effect, limit certain choices for consumers.”
The GARM safety guidelines label “debated sensitive social” issues and “hate speech” as categories of content that are “not appropriate for any advertising support.” GARM has blacklisted companies like The Daily Wire, which a “brand safety” executive from the coalition said was on their “global high risk exclusion list” and categorized the platform under “conspiracy theories.”
GARM’s efforts to censor conservatives and other “disfavored” content included threatening Spotify and The Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast on the platform, over alleged misinformation because Rogan “stated an opinion that young, healthy people need not receive the COVID-19 vaccine,” according to the House Judiciary report.
The report also alleged that a GARM member candidly wrote that he “hated their ideology and bullshit,” in reference to conservative news outlets The Daily Wire and Breitbart News, but that they “couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion[s]” so they “watched them very carefully and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line.”
The suit from X that was filed in a Texas court alleged that GARM’s members had illegally colluded to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from the platform.
“As a condition of GARM membership, the group’s members agree to adopt, implement, and enforce GARM’s brand safety standards, including by withholding advertising from social media platforms deemed by GARM to be non-compliant with the brand safety standards,” the suit reads.
“We have proven our platform provides advertisers a way to showcase their brands and reach their target audiences safely, efficiently and effectively,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino said Tuesday in an open letter on the platform. “That’s why I’ve worked in good faith with marketers across the globe to showcase our innovations and allay any concerns with brands whom I’ve partnered with for decades. The unfortunate reality is that despite all our efforts, hundreds of meetings and research to the contrary, many companies chose to dismiss the facts. To those who broke the law, we say enough is enough.”
We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war https://t.co/elgT62uDtF
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2024
Rumble filed a lawsuit against GARM, alleging that the coalition had established “arbitrary standards” for content they were willing to monetize to “perpetrate an advertiser boycott” against the platform.
“The brand safety standards set by advertisers and their ad agencies should succeed or fail in the marketplace on their own merits and not through the coercive exercise of market power,” the lawsuit reads. “All of this illegal conduct is done at the expense of platforms, content creators, and their users, as well as the agencies’ own advertiser clients who pay more for ads as a result of their collusion.”
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