Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Thursday that he is opening an investigation into the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to determine whether the trade group’s members conspired to boycott “certain social media platforms.” While the press release doesn’t mention the social media platforms by name, one of them is likely Elon Musk’s
“Trade organizations and companies cannot collude to block advertising revenue from entities they seek to undermine,” Paxton said in the press release. “Today’s document request is part of an ongoing investigation to hold WFA and its members accountable for any attempt to manipulate the system. to harm organizations they may not agree with.”
Several WFA members – including global brands such as IBM, The Coca-Cola Company and CVS Health – have halted or significantly reduced the amount they spend on advertising on X since Elon Musk took over the company. There was a particularly large exodus of advertisers, including Apple and Disney, from X in November 2023 after reports from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters suggested that Elon Musk’s remove hateful content. At the time, a White House spokesman condemned Elon Musk for one of his personal messages, calling it “anti-Semitic and racist.”
Since then, Now it appears that Texas’ AG is conducting its own investigation.
“It’s still a big problem,” Musk said in response to Paxton’s Thursday post on X about the advertiser survey.
Like X’s lawsuit, Paxton targets a now-defunct nonprofit within the WFA, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. This was a US-based group founded in 2019 that included some of the country’s largest advertisers. It created frameworks and definitions for companies to understand hate speech, brand safety and disinformation.
The AG’s investigation requests documents and information from GARM that could reveal whether it directed brands to boycott certain social media platforms that violated brand safety standards.
