X asks appeals court to revive advertiser boycott suit as ad revenue slides

X, formerly known as Twitter, has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to overturn a district judge's ruling and allow its lawsuit against advertisers to go forward. The company argues that advertisers coordinated a boycott of the platform, eliminating independent decision-making and distorting competition across multiple markets in violation of antitrust law.

The case centers on the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a World Federation of Advertisers initiative created to define violent and obscene content and help brands develop safety guidelines. The advertising industry shut down GARM after Elon Musk filed the lawsuit in 2024. Law professors have described X's legal case as weak.

In its latest filing, X says GARM exercised collective power through membership rules: joining required members to adopt GARM solutions and enforce brand-safety standards on the social media platforms where they bought ads.

Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and made major changes to content moderation. Advertisers pulled back, worried about their ads appearing next to anti-Semitic posts, misinformation and other objectionable material. Revenue figures were hard to obtain because Musk took the company private, but X is now a subsidiary of SpaceX, which recently went public and must report earnings.

SpaceX's earnings report this week shows X made $367 million in advertising revenue in Q2 2026, down from $426 million in the same quarter of 2025. For the first half of 2026, ad revenue totaled $710 million, compared with $870 million in the first half of 2025. In Q2 2022, the last quarter before Musk's takeover, Twitter reported $1.08 billion in ad revenue—about $713 million more than X brought in during Q2 2026.