‘A dangerous precedent’: GARM discontinues activities after Elon Musk’s X files suit

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) is discontinuing the activities of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) after Elon Musk’s company X filed an antitrust suit against the latter.

“Since its launch, GARM has enhanced transparency in ad placements on digital social media by providing voluntary and pro-competitive tools for the advertising industry,” the WFA said, in part, in a statement on Friday. “These tools provide information to help advertisers avoid inadvertently supporting harmful and illegal content, reducing such ads from 6.1% in 2020 to 1.7% in 2023.”

But the statement continued: “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 therefore is making the difficult decision to discontinue its activities.”

Several ad industry insiders expressed alarm about the dismantling of GARM, which has done so much to set brand safety floors for advertisers. One called it “a horrific outcome.”

Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence at the ad industry watchdog group Check My Ads, tells The Current that it “sets a dangerous precedent that could embolden Elon and others to launch more unwarranted attacks on advertisers.”

“The silver lining of this is that advertisers now have an opportunity to take back control and establish standards that meet their own needs and expectations, with their customers at the core,” Garcia says.

Others see the X lawsuit as a cynical strategy. “I don’t even think Musk is serious in suing the big advertisers, but GARM was the easy target to hang on the wall as a warning to risk averse and smaller industry bodies to avoid criticism of X,” says Noah Mallin, the former chief strategic officer at IMGN Media. “Ultimately, it will cost X money without bringing any advertisers back.”

Marc Zander, chief client officer at Teads, speculated on LinkedIn that Musk’s actions “will do more to make advertisers cut investment in X than anything GARM might have done.”

GARM, which the WFA started in 2019, is a coalition of brands that aims to improve or set digital-advertising and brand-safety standards. The WFA’s website describes the organization as “a cross-industry initiative […] to help the industry address the challenge of illegal or harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising.”

One example of GARM’s work: the organization, along with Ad Net Zero, released the Global Media Sustainability Framework in June during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The framework recommended ad industry standards to help cut down on carbon emissions.

“GARM has been pivotal in galvanizing the industry around our collective responsibility to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of media and advertising,” says Amy Williams, founder and CEO of Good-Loop. “This doesn’t undermine all the work already done, and we suspect those standards will continue in some form as the need for such guidance will not go away.”

X, the social-media company owned by Musk, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that GARM “conspired” with some major brands to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from what was at the time still Twitter.

The suit claims that, after Musk bought Twitter in November 2022, GARM “conveyed to its members its concerns about Twitter’s compliance with GARM’S standards, triggering the massive advertiser boycott that followed.”

The suit further claims that “at least 18” GARM-member advertisers stopped advertising on the platform “either in the United States or worldwide” between November, 2022 and December 2022 and that “dozens more substantially reduced their purchases of advertising from Twitter (and then X) over the course of 2023, in many instances by over 70 percent.”

Brand-safety concerns surrounding Twitter, now X, did take on greater emphasis after Musk took over the company. In April 2023, researchers released a report that found that Twitter accounts known for hate speech “dramatically” increased their usage under Musk. That June, two executives in charge of brand safety on the platform, vice president of trust and safety Ella Irwin and head of brand safety and quality A.J. Brown, exited the company.

Advertising makes up the bulk of X’s revenue, which dropped 53% in the second quarter this year compared to the same quarter in 2023, according to The New York Times.

"X is a prime example of an experiment gone wrong,” says Kevin Wassong, the founder and CEO of mktg.ai. “Until Musk and [X CEO] Linda [Yaccarino] implement solutions that fix the problems of that platform, which at its core is a distribution system for media, advertisers should clearly have the right to not spend on their platform.”