WICHITA FALLS, Tex. \u2014 Elon Musk\u2019s social media platform X has sued a group of advertisers, alleging that a \u201cmassive advertiser boycott\u201d deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.<\/p>\n
The company formerly known as Twitter filed the lawsuit Tuesday in a federal court in Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers and member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted.<\/p>\n
It accused the advertising group\u2019s initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, of helping to coordinate a pause in advertising after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and overhauled its staff and policies.<\/p>\n
Musk posted about the lawsuit on X on Tuesday, saying \u201cnow it is war\u201d after two years of being nice and \u201cgetting nothing but empty words.\u201d<\/p>\n
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a video announcement that the lawsuit stemmed in part from evidence uncovered by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee which she said showed a \u201cgroup of companies organized a systematic illegal boycott\u201d against X.<\/p>\n
The Republican-led committee had a hearing last month looking at whether current laws are \u201csufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.\u201d<\/p>\n
The lawsuit\u2019s allegations center on the early days of Musk\u2019s Twitter takeover and not a more recent dispute with advertisers that came a year later.<\/p>\n
In November 2023, about a year after Musk bought the company, a number of advertisers began fleeing X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with Musk inflaming tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.<\/p>\n
Musk later said those fleeing advertisers were engaging in \u201cblackmail\u201d and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WICHITA FALLS, Tex. \u2014 Elon Musk\u2019s social media platform X has sued a group of advertisers,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6313,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}