Three weeks ago, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled “Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.” The primary concern of that hearing, as our own Nate Jackson put it, was leftists “using censorship to cut off revenue sources for conservative media sites that depend on advertising.”

That hearing also exposed the mechanism a cabal of global leftists developed to control online speech: the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM.

GARM is the entity responsible for 80% of advertisers boycotting X (formerly Twitter) immediately after Elon Musk bought the social media company.

Musk has blamed the mass ad boycott on GARM, calling the organization an “advertising boycott racket.” A 39-page report created by the Judiciary Committee on GARM appears to support this accusation. As the report reads:

According to one GARM member, GARM recommended that its members “stop all paid advertisement” on Twitter in response to Mr. Musk’s acquisition of the company. GARM’s internal documents show that GARM was asked by a member to “arrange a meeting and hear more about [GARM’s] perspectives about the Twitter situation and a possible boycott from many companies.” GARM also held “extensive debriefing and discussion around Elon Musks’ [sic] takeover of Twitter,” providing ample opportunity for the boycott to be organized. GARM bragged about “taking on Elon Musk” and “[s]ince then [Twitter was] 80% below revenue forecasts.”

Now, Musk has raised an antitrust lawsuit against the group. This week, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced that the social media giant is suing the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), the group behind GARM. “No small group of people should be able to monopolize what gets monetized,” Yaccarino stated in an X video announcing the lawsuit, adding, “GARM celebrated — and took responsibility for — the massive economic harm imposed on Twitter by the boycott, boasting within just a few months of the start of the boycott that ‘they [Twitter] are 80% below revenue forecasts.’”

A Message to X Users pic.twitter.com/6bZOYPhWVa

— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) August 6, 2024

And X is not alone in its suit against WFA; the video-sharing site Rumble has also joined. Furthermore, Rumble is suing the advertising mega-firm WPP and its subsidiary GroupM, alleging that these entities form an “advertising cartel.” In its lawsuit, Rumble states, “In a competitive market, advertising agencies would compete with one another on their ability to place their customers’ ads according to their customers’ individual preferences and marketing plans.” Instead, “GARM uses the market power of its members and their clients to force platforms to submit to GARM’s demands.”

GARM is an international organization headquartered in Belgium. It represents over 90% of the global ad market. GARM’s leader and cofounder, Rob Rakowitz, is no fan of the First Amendment and its free speech protections, having bemoaned the “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution” and complained about using “‘principles for governance’ and applying them as literal law from 230 years ago (made by white men exclusively).” Instead of individual free speech rights, GARM envisions an “uncommon collaboration” to “rise above individual commercial interest.”

In other words, GARM wants to control what speech and ideas are deemed acceptable in the public square. To this aim, GARM is collaborating with other leftist speech-rating outfits like NewsGuard as they build and impose what would amount to a global social credit score mechanism. Their goal is to drive both culture and politics toward a leftist worldview.

It is clearly un-American, and GARM’s very existence should be an affront to any freedom-loving individual. Thankfully, Musk has stepped up to the plate to defend freedom of speech and take on those who would suppress it.

Update: The WFA has announced that it is “discontinuing” GARM. While WFA rejected any notion that it was engaged in antitrust activities, it claimed the decision to disband GARM was “not made lightly” and that it was primarily due to GARM being a not-for-profit organization that couldn’t afford the legal challenge. X CEO Linda Yaccarino responded to the development, stating, “No small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized. This is an important acknowledgement and a necessary step in the right direction. I am hopeful that it means ecosystem-wide reform is coming.” This is a big win for Musk and freedom of speech. Though, as our Mark Alexander observes, “I presume this effort will come back in some more insidious and less visible form.”