X sues advertisers for ‘illegal boycott’ of the platform

X, whose top executives have long railed against advertisers who fled the platform amid concerns over hate speech, is now also suing them. X has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and several of its members, including Mars, Unilever and CVS Health, CEO Linda Yaccarino said in an open letter shared on X.

According to Yaccarino, the group engaged in an “illegal boycott” of X. “The consequence – perhaps the intent – of this boycott was to seek to deprive X’s users, be they sports fans, gamers, journalists, activists, parents or political and corporate leaders, of the Global Town Square,” she wrote.

As Axios points out, GARM is part of the World Federation of Advertisers (which is also named in the lawsuit) and was created to come up with brand safety guidelines for online advertisers. The lawsuit alleges that the group “conspired, along with dozens of non-defendant co-conspirators, to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue from Twitter.”

GARM didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s not the first time X has filed a lawsuit against a group that Musk has accused of stoking an advertiser exodus from the platform. The company previously sued the Center Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an anti-hate group that published research showing that X failed to take down hateful posts shared by premium subscribers. That lawsuit was later dismissed by a judge who said X was trying to “punish” the group for sharing unflattering research. X is also suing Media Matters, a watchdog group that published a report showing X had displayed ads alongside anti-Semitic content.

“We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words,” Musk, who nearly a year ago publicly told advertisers to “go fuck themselves,” wrote in a post on Tuesday. “Now, it is war.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/x-sues-advertisers-for-illegal-boycott-of-the-platform-173100888.html?src=rss