Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter , renamed it X , and started transmogrifying it into a scaled version of 4chan, he and the platform have had a strained relationship with the advertising industry. Advertisers notably dislike controversy, and Musk is really good at courting it. Last November, true to form, Musk offended a bunch of people and then told advertisers who were considering pulling their content from his site that they could “go fuck” themselves .
He clarified that if companies or ad executives found him or his site offensive they should pull up stakes and take their revenue elsewhere. Well, here we are, a little less than a year later, and Musk’s company is now suing a bunch of advertisers who took their revenue elsewhere. It turns out that so much advertising money has fled X over the past two years that the company is in serious trouble.
A recent New York Times article claims the company’s ad revenue is down 53% from where it was last year. Now, the company has announced litigation against a consortium of advertisers, some of whom pulled their content from the site following Musk’s acquisition. The lawsuit , which was filed on Tuesday, is against various members of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM, a little-known consortium of major advertisers who dedicate themselves to addressing “the challenge of illegal or harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising.
” In essence, GARM purports to dissuade c.