"We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war," Elon Musk said in a post on X Tuesday after the social media company filed an antitrust lawsuit against an advertising industry coalition. The lawsuit filed in federal court in Texas accuses the World Federation of Advertisers and member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health, and Orsted of illegally conspiring to boycott the platform after Musk bought it in 2022, reports Reuters. It claims that the advertisers, acting through the group's Global Alliance for Responsible Media safety initiative, withheld "billions of dollars in advertising revenue" from what was then Twitter.
The lawsuit says advertisers conspired to withhold spending over concerns the platform would "deviate from certain brand safety standards for advertising" under Musk's leadership, per Variety. In a video posted on X, CEO Linda Yaccarino said evidence uncovered by the House Judiciary Committee showed the companies had organized a "systematic illegal boycott." "They conspired to boycott X, which threatens our ability to thrive in the future," she said. "That puts your global town square, the one place you can express yourself freely and openly, at long term risk." Experts say that since there's no sign a lack of competition led to higher prices, this doesn't resemble a typical antitrust lawsuit, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, an antitrust professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, tells the Journal that advertisers apparently pulled spending "because they didn't believe in the policies of X," an action that would be protected by the First Amendment. Ruben Schreurs, chief strategy officer at marketing consulting form Equity, tells the New York Times that "to the extent that Elon hadn't already burned all bridges and ties with the entire advertising community," he doesn't "see how this will get any advertisers to come back to X." He describes the lawsuit as "a last-ditch effort to force brands who don't want to be in the cross hairs of this kind of legal action to return to the platform." (More X.com stories.)
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