It is difficult these days, in any area of human existence, not to encounter Elon Musk. Suddenly, the richest man in the world has become ubiquitous. His energetic presence is increasingly making itself felt, to the displeasure of those who had assumed they had carved out for themselves unassailable niches of authority and now find themselves challenged by one of the few men on earth with the material resources to combat the power blocs that globalist entities have constructed.

Last week, at the very moment when the Labour government was pledging to ramp up AI surveillance in Britain – with live facial recognition used by China and Russia but banned in most European countries – Musk, who has already challenged Keir Starmer’s authoritarian ambitions, delivered a body blow to the censorship apparatus by forcing the dissolution of GARM, one of the most aggressive enemies of online freedom. 

This was an enormously significant moment in the struggle to preserve free speech, the first occasion on which the relentlessly leftwards-turning ratchet of censorship has been smashed. Nobody is foolish enough to believe that Musk has won the war; but he has won a major battle, the consequences of which will take some time to assess. It is questionable whether British commentators have adequately grasped the full context and implications of the demise of GARM, so it is worth reviewing the situation.

GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) was a creation of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), a Brussels-based organisation that works in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), UNICEF, the World Health Organization and similar-minded bodies. The WFA was an innocuous advertising industry body when it was founded in 1953, but, in the past couple of decades, it has become ideologically driven. Stephan Loerke, the WFA CEO since 2003, who formerly worked at the UN headquarters in New York, has said that the organisation has a responsibility to make advertising more diverse and inclusive, as a “measure of common progress”.

For popular consumption, the WFA talks a good game about identifying “best practice standards” for marketing. But its initiatives such as its “diversity and inclusion hub” and its diversity and inclusion Task Force have been criticised as influenced by critical race theory. In 2020, it produced a study that claimed consumers wanted to see brands supporting “anti-racist” education for employees and support for the Black Lives Matter movement. It supports the leftist concept of pay equity, “progressive gender portrayals in advertising” and has demanded the abandonment of terms such as “blacklist”, labelling them racially charged.

The political orientation of the WFA is obvious and legitimate, except when it seeks to use its influence to promote political views in a controlling way throughout the advertising industry, the premier forum of global communication. In that forum, the WFA is a massive presence. It represents client-side marketers and its member organisations account for 90 per cent of the world’s annual marketing communications expenditure, amounting to roughly $900bn a year.

That is an overwhelmingly powerful entity, pervading global advertising, with all the potential to influence public opinion around the world that such a commanding situation implies. That is where GARM came in. In 2019, the WFA launched a new programme called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), as a satellite organisation more directly involved in the project of online censorship.

GARM was launched in the aftermath of a mass terrorist shooting in New Zealand, its mission supposedly being to work with the industry to prevent the monetising of illegal and harmful content via advertising. On the face of it, a laudable objective. In the event, it proved a potent instrument for starving conservative platforms and sites of advertising. Sceptics claim it was not created in the aftermath of the Christchurch atrocity so much as in the wake of the 2016 US election, when the left was badly caught out by the unexpected strength of conservative, pro-Trump opinion online.

When Musk bought Twitter, now X, he made clear his intention to relax censorship of conservative views. The resulting extravagant outcry made it sound as if he was proposing to convert Twitter into a platform seeking the establishment of a Fourth Reich. The reality was that Twitter’s anti-conservative policy had previously been so extreme that it had banned Donald Trump, with a following of 88.7 million, while still the incumbent president of the United States, in January 2021, on the pretext of his alleged incitement of the Capitol “insurrection”.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter and conversion of it into X was met by a concerted boycott by advertisers. That was not provoked by his actions: the boycott was being canvassed before he even acquired ownership of the platform. The mere rumour that Twitter/X might become a forum of free expression was enough to galvanise the censorship lobby. In that anti-democratic exercise GARM played a key role.

It all began to go wrong for GARM on 5 May, 2023 when Jim Jordan, chairman of the US House Judiciary Committee, subpoenaed senior GARM and WFA officials for documents and communications related to their coordinated efforts to demonetize and censor “disfavored” speech online. This followed after a letter had been sent on 22 March requesting such material: neither GARM nor the WFA submitted a single document.

On 10 July, 2024 the Committee published its preliminary report, ahead of a hearing on whether advertisers were violating federal competition laws. The report and the instructive email chain published as appendices tore away the fig-leaf of respectable concern over “brand safety” online, to expose a coalition promoting ideological censorship of conservative opinion, in a collusive manner that constituted a cartel, damaging the interests of “disfavored” platforms.

One comment attracted immediate interest: “Uncommon collaboration needs to be understood as the industry coming together and putting aside competitive concerns in the interest of safety” (our emphasis), in Appendix, p. 106. The Committee report stated: “GARM and its members discussed a strategy of blocking certain news outlets like Fox News, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart News,” citing a senior executive associated with the coalition saying that he “hated their ideology and bulls**t”. What has that to do with brand protection and the other concerns that GARM hypocritically claimed to promote?

Beyond that, GARM’s head and co-founder, Rab Rakowitz, was revealed as virulently hostile to the American constitution, which he denounced as written “by white men exclusively” and he complained about people “advocating for freedom of speech online”. Obviously, Rabkowitz was frustrated by the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech for American citizens and objected to its principles extending overseas (“extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution”).

The report revealed that GARM tried to direct all its members to “stop all paid advertisement” on Twitter, after it was bought by Elon Musk, and “bragged about” the fact that Twitter was “80% below revenue forecasts” as a consequence. GARM also pressured Spotify over Joe Rogan’s podcast, knowing full well that in doing so it was flouting antitrust legislation, since one of Rakowitz’s emails admitted that such conduct “gets us into hot water by way of anticompetitive and collusive behaviors”.

Rakoweitz was right about that. The Judiciary Committee report concluded that “GARM likely violated federal antitrust laws”, stating it had found “direct evidence” that GARM was “demonetizing certain viewpoints to limit consumer choice”, thus harming consumers. The report damningly said: “Colluding to suppress voices and views disfavored by the leading marketers at the world’s largest companies and advertising agencies is core to GARM’s founding principles.”

Musk, who had tried reinstatement of X within GARM, saw the extent of GARM’s activities, far beyond X, in impoverishing and suppressing free speech, on which Musk has described himself as an “absolutist”, and took prompt action. On 6 August, X filed a federal lawsuit against GARM, its members CVS Health, Mars, Orsted, Unilever and the parent body, the WFA, for alleged antitrust activities. Within 48 hours, the WFA responded by dissolving GARM – the first victory for free-speech activism in the past decade.

The dissolution of GARM has been represented as a recognition by the WFA that it could not match Elon Musk’s spending power on litigation, an unusual reverse for the mega-rich corporations imposing Righthink online. However, that does not get the WFA or the constituent corporations cited by Musk off the hook. There is still a case to be answered and the Judiciary Committee is pursuing its investigations and subpoenaing witnesses.

To read the screaming outrage of the leftist media, who see their monopolist ambitions threatened by this setback, you could easily imagine that companies were being compelled to advertise on X. On the contrary, it is perfectly possible that all of the companies that previously boycotted X will continue to do so. 

The important difference is that it will now be a policy decision taken by individual boards, accountable to shareholders. It will no longer be possible, at AGMs, for boards to cite GARM, as if it were a universal moral authority, as justification for not advertising on many conservative sites with large followings, on which shareholders may feel it would be advantageous to display the brand. The cartel security of knowing that competitors are also bound to the same boycott has been removed. If a company decides to advertise on X, or any other “disfavored” platform, how can rivals sit on their hands and allow it an unchallenged presence on conservative platforms?

That is where the essence of antitrust law comes into play. While the law condemns the interests of consumers being damaged by a cartel preventing them from having access to potentially appealing advertising, the interests of shareholders are even more directly impacted by their company’s invisibility to conservative consumers which, in the case of the United States, means half the population of that fractured country.

Any company or individual has the right to boycott an organisation or corporation – Bud Light was an example of a spontaneous boycott – the offence lies in the premeditated, manipulated collusion to damage the interests of another company. That is where GARM flouted the law, for which there may still be significant consequences, and it is why the leftist elites are so concerned. For how can GARM be replaced? A successor organisation will now be subject to the same legal challenge. What kamikaze companies will volunteer for membership of an organisation that may be prosecuted as a cartel?

Importantly, this also coincides with a wave of disillusionment and disengagement by companies from the twin impositions of ESG and DEI. These are not easy times in the business world and shareholders, now aware either of studies exposing the damaging consequences of those delusory activities, or experiencing them directly in reduced dividends, are no longer in the mood to tolerate such boardroom posturing.

There is still a massive war to be fought to reclaim freedom of speech online and everywhere else. Britain’s Labour government has embraced intolerance in the wake of the riots. Over the past week, intemperate and menacing statements have been coming simultaneously from two heads of government: remove the attribution and it would be impossible to identify which authoritarian rant was uttered by Keir Starmer and which by Nicolás Maduro. 

Labour’s target now is free speech online, shamelessly articulating censorship ambitions. The aim is to exclude Wrongthink by erecting a Cyber Curtain between Britons and freedom. In the struggle against tyranny, it is welcome news that Elon Musk is willing to devote his huge resources to defending freedom of expression and that he has already won a significant victory by putting one malevolent censorship vehicle out of business.

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