A court has dismissed a lawsuit filed by X against companies that boycotted advertising on its platform. The suit was filed in August 2024 in an effort to force the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), and CVS Health, Mars, Orsted and Unilever to return to using X’s advertising platform. X’s argument at the time was that all the defendants’ actions were illegal.
The judge ruled that X failed to prove harm under antitrust law while the allegation of a conspiracy to destroy X did not meet the requirements of an antitrust claim.
The world’s leading brands pulled advertisers from X because it was displayed under content labeled as racist, hateful and obscene. X later said its advertising systems had been updated to prevent this from happening again for security reasons.
However, advertising has not yet recovered and X needs to generate revenue by selling X Premium subscriptions that offer a blue-print for identity verification and access to some exclusive X Pro features, tweet editing and monetization.
Since Musk took over, X has allowed content that would have previously resulted in user accounts being suspended. Elon Musk has said that X will be a platform for absolute freedom of expression without any restrictions now. His stance caused X’s advertising revenue to plummet to the point where the platform was losing money before being sold to xAI last year.
