EXCLUSIVE: Ad Cartel Colluded With Foreign Governments Against Elon Musk’s Twitter

The advertising industry “cartel” that existed to censor online speech in the name of “brand safety” was directly involved in organizing the corporate boycott of Twitter after Elon Musk bought it, even working with foreign regulators to orchestrate its pressure campaign against the social media platform, a bombshell congressional investigation found.

The House Judiciary Committee released emails on Friday showing that the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a now-defunct coalition created by the World Federation of Advertisers that used its control of the global advertising spending to bankrupt conservative publishers, was working with regulators in Europe and Australia to force Twitter, now X, to fall in line with its censorship demands.

X is suing the World Federation of Advertisers along with the social media platform Rumble, alleging that the coalition engaged in anti-competitive activity to facilitate boycotts and force tech platforms to censor content. The Friday report provides evidence that GARM was in fact intimately involved in organizing the boycott, and that it was being carried out for explicitly political reasons.

The head of GARM, Rob Rakowitz, expressed a desire in emails to stop President Donald Trump and the “contagion” he represents.

“My main thing is I need to see Trump … effectively sidelined but I am afraid the contagion is too widespread to protect infection overall,” Rakowitz wrote in a November 2022 email to an Australian official, as he was coordinating opposition to Musk’s changes at Twitter.

The report found that Rakowitz and GARM prepared statements for its members to publicly protest changes Musk was making at Twitter.

“The bird has gone from freed to fried,” Rakowitz wrote to all its members, stating that the “platform poses real risks.” The email, which describes the situation as a “crisis,” was an attempt to convey to GARM’s members that Twitter was now “unsafe” and they needed to “cease and desist” from advertising on Twitter.

“I’ve crafted a message that needs to be posted ASAP and distributed,” Rakowitz writes. “I have navigated the situation as best as we can in terms of our anticompetitive statues [sic] and have gone as close as possible as we can to saying ‘Twitter is unsafe, cease and desist.’”

The legal concerns appear to be well-founded. Trump’s Federal Trade Commission is actively investigating whether the advertising industry violated antitrust laws by coordinating through GARM.

On Monday, two of the world’s largest advertising agencies, both founding members of GARM, announced an agreement with the FTC to cease all coordination that was taking place to direct advertising dollars away from disfavored publishers. The firms, Omnicom and IPG, are also agreeing to cooperate with the Trump administration’s investigation into the coordination that took place while GARM was still in place.

READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Trump FTC Secures Landmark Agreement to End Political Collusion in Advertising Industry

The House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), had announced an investigation into the two firms for their involvement with GARM last November.

In emails previously unveiled by Jordan’s committee, Rakowitz says the goal of GARM was to “fund the voices we want to associate with, and close down the advertising ecosystem to bad actors.”

Those “bad actors” included outlets like The Daily Wire, which was put on a “Global High Risk” blacklist by the advertising coalition and flagged, without evidence, for spreading “conspiracy theories.”

His emails, revealed in the committee’s initial report last July, revealed stunning political bias by Rakowitz and other executives. Rakowitz in one email complained that the U.S. Constitution was written “by white men exclusively.”

READ MORE: GARM Exposed: House Judiciary Report Says Ad Coalition Likely Broke Law To Silence Conservatives

The past emails also showed that GARM aimed to “stop all paid advertisement” to Musk’s Twitter, and “bragged about” its success. In emails it celebrated the fact that Twitter was “80% below revenue forecasts” after its effort to starve advertising dollars from it.

The new report sheds light on how that effort played out. Not only was GARM urging its members (which together controlled about 90% of global advertising) to yank advertising from the platform, but it was urging regulators in the European Union and Australia to pressure Musk’s Twitter to censor content in line with GARM’s demands.

The emails show that the European Commission was working “to push Twitter to deliver on GARM asks.” And in Australia, the head of the eSafety Commission was hailing GARM’s “significant collective power” to get GARM to bend the knee.

GARM also shared confidential metrics regarding Twitter’s compliance with its standards, as part of its effort to prompt ad boycotts. Though GARM changed its policy to make the metrics public for everyone, it was done right after Musk’s purchase and done explicitly to hurt Twitter.

We know that, because Rakowitz laid out his master plan in an email to his leadership team.

“We are doubling down on where our power is; standards and transparency and allowing advertisers to make informed
decisions,” Rakowitz said, before noting that the transparency was done strategically. “This way it’s not singling Twitter out, but we know where eyes will be.”

After the change, all Twitter’s policy changes would be visible to its members, allowing advertising firms to say they changed their ad spend because Twitter changed its standards.

“This feels damn good,” Rakowitz wrote after laying out his plan.

All of these actions took place even as members in GARM knew its actions weren’t popular. Internal emails show awareness that the American consumers it was supposed to be advertising to valued free speech over censorship of potentially “harmful” content, but GARM executives went ahead with the effort nonetheless.

A June 2020 email showed Gallup polling was circulated to GARM executives showing that 66% of consumers prioritized freedom of speech over “risks of exposure to harmful content.”

The report highlights regret from major corporate participants that they were a part of the censorship cartel, which went “too far” in its efforts to restrict speech.

Gerry D’Angelo, a Proctor & Gamble executive who helped lead GARM, says the effort undermined the “business objectives” of its clients.

“If you were to ask me and say, ‘Did we go too far in those first rounds of exclusionary restrictions?’ I would say yes,” D’Angelo said, in a quote highlighted by the report. D’Angelo adds that GARM required companies “to boycott too many websites” and that the negative consequences of brand safety “never actually materialized.”

“GARM’s collusive activity ot only hurt consumers, but al GARM’s members who sacrificed opportunities because they were led to believe that these brand safety precautions were both necessary and beneficial in promoting advertisers’ core business objectives,” the report states.

The full report can be read below:

GARM Report 2.0 by Daily Wire Investigations Team