A group of advertisers is the target of a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s social media platform X, which claims that a “massive advertiser boycott” cost the business billions of dollars in lost revenue and broke antitrust laws.
The former Twitter filed the complaint against the World Federation of Advertisers and its member businesses, Unilever, Mars, CVS Health, and Orsted, in a federal court in Texas on Tuesday.
It claimed that the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a program of the advertising organization, was involved in arranging a halt to advertising following Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late 2022, during which time the company reorganized its personnel and policy.
Musk declared in a post on X on Tuesday that “now it is war” following two years of polite behavior and “getting nothing but empty words.”
In a video statement, X CEO Linda Yaccarino stated that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s discovery of evidence that a “group of companies organized a systematic illegal boycott” against X was a contributing factor in the case.
Last month, a hearing was held by the Republican-led committee to examine whether the laws in place are “sufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.”
The claims made in the case are focused on the initial stages of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, rather than a more recent conflict with advertisers that surfaced a year later.
About a year after Musk acquired the business, in November 2023, several advertisers started to leave X due to worries that their advertisements would appear next to hate speech and pro-Nazi material on the platform as a whole. Musk exacerbated the situation by supporting an antisemitic conspiracy theory in one of his own postings.
Afterwards, Musk used a foul language to effectively tell the marketers who were running away that they were being used for “blackmail” and to leave.
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