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Elon Musk’s social media platform X sues a group Advertisersalleging a “massive advertiser boycott” deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.
The company, formerly known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Texas on Tuesday against the World Federation of Advertisers and its member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted.
It accused the ad group’s initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, of helping coordinate the ad pause following Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late 2022, overhauled its personnel and policies.
Musk posted information about the lawsuit on the X website on Tuesday, saying that after two years of goodwill and “getting nothing but empty words,” “now it’s war.”
In an announcement for the film, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said the lawsuit stems in part from evidence uncovered by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that she said showed “a group of companies organized a systematic and illegal boycott of X.” ”.
The Republican-led committee held a hearing last month to explore whether existing laws “suffice to prevent anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.”
The lawsuit’s allegations focus on the early days of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, rather than the more recent disputes with advertisers a year later.
In November 2023, about a year after Musk acquired the company, many advertisers began fleeing X out of fear that their ads would appear next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site, exacerbated by Musk’s own posts tensions in support of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Musk later said the advertisers who fled were engaging in “blackmail” and used profanity to essentially tell them to leave.
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