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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Announce On Thursday, it opens an investigation into the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to determine whether members of the trade group conspired to boycott “certain social media platforms.” While the press release did not mention the social media platforms by name, one of them is likely Elon Musk’s X Company, which filed an antitrust lawsuit against WFA in August and alleged that advertisers organized a “systematic illegal boycott” of the platform.
“Commercial organizations and corporations cannot collude to withhold advertising revenue from entities they wish to undermine,” Paxton said in the press release. “Today’s document request is part of an ongoing investigation to hold the WFA and its members accountable for any attempt to game the system to harm organizations they may disagree with.”
Many WFA members — which include global brands like IBM, The Coca-Cola Company and CVS Health — have halted or significantly reduced the amount they spend on advertising on X since Elon Musk acquired the company. There was a particularly large exodus of advertisers, including Apple and Disney, from X in November 2023 after reports from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters that suggested Elon Musk’s At the time, a White House spokesman said Elon Musk was condemned for one of his personal postsWhich she described as “anti-Semitic and racist.”
Since then, Texas’ AG brings its own investigation.
“This is still a big problem,” Musk said. answer To Paxton’s Thursday post on X about the Advertiser’s investigation.
Just like X’s lawsuit, Paxton focuses on a since-defunct nonprofit within the WFA, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. This was a US-based group founded in 2019 that included some of the country’s largest advertisers. I have created frameworks and definitions for companies to understand hate speech, brand safety, and misinformation.
The Attorney General’s investigations are requesting documents and information from GARM that could reveal whether it has asked brands to boycott certain social media platforms that violate its brand safety standards.
In announcing her platform’s lawsuit against advertisers, X CEO Linda Yaccarino cited July report From the US House Judiciary Committee looking into GARM practices. This report found:
Through GARM, large corporations, advertising agencies, and industry associations have engaged in boycotts and other coordinated actions to discredit platforms, podcasts, news outlets, and other content deemed objectionable by GARM and its members. This collusion can have the effect of removing the variety of content and viewpoints available to consumers.
Garm It closed its doors in Augustshortly after X filed a lawsuit, stating that it did not have the resources or financial resources to continue operating.
In the months leading up to this investigation, some advertisers had already resumed ad spending on X, albeit at much lower rates than before. Comcast, IBM, Disney and other major brands are said to be He returned to Musk’s platform this year. Furthermore, X announced in October that it had reached an agreement with Unilever to resume its advertising spending, and that the social media platform would operate Dropping its claims against UnileverWhich X previously named as one of the companies that participated in the alleged boycott.
X and the Global Association of Advertisers did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
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