(Bloomberg) -- The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a prominent coalition of advertisers, dissolved on Thursday, just days after Elon Musk’s X filed a lawsuit against the organization.
GARM was established in 2019 by the World Federation of Advertisers, a network of major businesses whose members include Nike Inc., McDonald’s Corp. and Procter & Gamble Co., among others. The coalition provided a set of widely-used guidelines for brand safety controls, which help advertisers prevent harmful content such as hate speech or violent content from appearing next to their advertisements on social media platforms and other places.
Musk’s X filed a lawsuit against GARM on Tuesday, claiming the organization was responsible for an “illegal” advertising boycott that took place in 2022 shortly after Musk took over the company, then called Twitter.
“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,” the group wrote in a statement on its website. “GARM therefore is making the difficult decision to discontinue its activities.”
Musk has a long history of filing lawsuits against organizations he perceives as threatening to X’s struggling advertising business. Last July, X sued a nonprofit group that researched online hate after it found an increase in harmful content on the site. Then in November, X sued Media Matters for America, after the organization found antisemitic content next to advertisements from major brands. Following the report, which coincided with Musk himself engaging with antisemitic posts on the network, advertisers including Walt Disney Co. and Apple Inc. pulled their ads from the platform.
Lou Paskalis, a former ad executive who now runs the consultancy firm AJL Advisory, described Musk’s decision to sue GARM as “extraordinary” and said that the group’s closure will have a “chilling effect” on how the industry operates moving forward. “I’m enraged by this,” he said.
X’s business, which is largely dominated by advertising, has declined close to 50% since Musk took over the platform and loosened content safety rules. The changes, combined with Musk’s own engagement with accounts that spread conspiracy and racist sentiments, drove away advertisers concerned about the type of content their ads would appear next to.
(Updates with comment from GARM in the fourth paragraph.)
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