(Headline USA) Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has sued a group of leftist corporations, saying a “massive advertiser boycott” in the wake of his Twitter takeover deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.
We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war https://t.co/elgT62uDtF
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2024
The company filed the lawsuit Tuesday in a federal court in Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers and member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted.
It accused the advertising group’s initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, of colluding to throttle advertising after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and overhauled its staff and policies in a bid to restore its function as a platform for free speech.
Increasingly, the San Francisco-based tech giant had begun to aggressively censor U.S. conservative viewpoints, including efforts to meddle in the 2020 election by suppressing posts about Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop.
Twitter was discovered to have been secretly coordinating with intelligence agencies such as the FBI, as well as with the Biden campaign, in forming its policies on what speech to censor.
Nonetheless, the woke corporations named in Musk’s lawsuit quicky sought to punish him for daring to allow verboten viewpoints on the site.
Musk posted about the lawsuit on X on Tuesday, saying “now it is war” after two years of being nice and “getting nothing but empty words.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a video announcement that the lawsuit stemmed in part from evidence uncovered by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee which she said showed a “group of companies organized a systematic illegal boycott” against X.
A Message to X Users pic.twitter.com/6bZOYPhWVa
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) August 6, 2024
The Republican-led committee had a hearing last month looking at whether current laws are “sufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.”
The lawsuit’s allegations center on the early days of Musk’s Twitter takeover and not a more recent dispute with advertisers that came a year later, in which several used a debunked story from the leftist propaganda site Media Matters to accuse Musk of supporting anti-Semitism.
Musk later said those fleeing advertisers were engaging in “blackmail” and famously told them to “go f**k yourself.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
