Elon Musk’s relationship to Twitter advertisers over the past year can best be described as “adversarial,” but the Tesla CEO announced a new level of combativeness Thursday: He intends to take brands who took their ad spend away from the platform to court in hopes they’ll be criminally prosecuted for not paying him.
After Musk purchased Twitter last year, a mass of advertisers fled the site — largely due to the fear that their ads would show up alongside the antisemitic content Musk continues to push. Musk responded maturely, by telling the advertisers to “go fuck” themselves, with the full knowledge of what that antagonistic relationship would do to ad spend on the platform. Musk later walked back the statement, and brought on Linda Yaccarino as CEO to try and woo advertisers back, but a new report from the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary has given him the ammo he thinks he needs for a legal battle.
Musk’s weird new tactic does have some legal backing, thanks to a report from the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary. The report concerns the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an effort from the World Federation of Advertisers and World Economic Forum that pushes to reduce “harmful content on digital media platforms.” No one wants their brand showing up right next to hate speech on social media, so GARM tries to reduce the chances of that happening.
The Committee on the Judiciary, apparently, has decided that that’s bad actually. The Committee refers to GARM’s actions — which, as a reminder, consist of “withholding ad dollars until platforms do Literally Anything about hate speech and misinformation” — as “seek[ing] to control online speech.”
An example is made in the report of GARM’s response to Spotify, a GARM member, platforming Joe Rogan’s podcast despite his batshit views on Covid-19 vaccination. As GARM attempts to minimize disinformation, the group apparently brought this contrast up to Spotify — a move that the Committee calls “attempt[ing] to pressure Spotify into censoring Joe Rogan due to his views.”
There is a difference between privately holding a view that is objectively, scientifically, provably false, and pushing that belief onto an impressionable audience. GARM can only affect the latter, and only in the most oblique way — encouraging member companies like GM, Mastercard, and Nike to withhold ad dollars. Yet somehow, this free trade between private corporations is censorship in the eyes of the House, and it’s provided Musk the legal basis he needs for a suit.
Musk revealed his intent to sue via tweet, of course, and didn’t expand on what his plans actually entailed. I, for one, am very interested to see what the courts say to the claim of “it’s illegal not to spend money on my website.” That’ll make for a fun precedent when the Supreme decides, 6-3, for Musk.