Musk's war with advertisers ends: X settles with GARM
X owner Elon Musk has reached a settlement with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which will remain inactive. The case, ruled legal by a court in March, had been appealed by X, but the parties have now agreed to settle.
X owner Elon Musk has reached a settlement with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and its initiative GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media). A joint statement confirmed that GARM will remain inactive as a result of the agreement. The statement claims the settlement "resets the relationship" between the organizations, which are now "fully aligned in the view that brands, platforms, and consumers will all benefit from brand-safety innovation." The WFA also said it is aligned with X on "its commitment to freedom of speech," a nod to controversial reports on X content that Musk said triggered his "war" with advertisers. Those reports found that as hateful content increased on the platform, X ad controls failed to prevent big brands' ads from appearing next to posts touting Hitler and the Nazi Party.
The settlement comes shortly after the launch of X Money, a payments product on the platform that Musk hopes will reduce X's reliance on advertising revenue. It is unclear why advertisers settled, since a court ruled in March that the ad boycott was perfectly legal and X's antitrust claims fell apart without proof of consumer harm. The next month, X appealed but appeared to drag its feet, asking for an extension until August. Settlement negotiations may have already been underway. Whether X Money can succeed at the scale needed to rival X's advertising business will likely depend on removing barriers to adoption, such as the possibility that transactions could be declined if an automated support error mistakenly suspends a user's account without warning. Additionally, X Money is not available in all 50 U.S. states.
