WICHITA FALLS, Texas (AP) — Elon Musk’s social media platform X has sued a group of advertisers, saying a “massive advertising boycott” cost the company billions in lost revenue and violated antitrust laws.
The company formerly known as Twitter filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in a federal court in Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers and its member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted.
She accused the advertising group’s brand safety initiative, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, of helping coordinate an advertising hiatus after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in delayed 2022 and overhauled its staff and policies.
Musk posted about the lawsuit on X on Tuesday, saying “now it’s war” after two years of being nice and “getting nothing but empty words.”
In a video announcement, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said the lawsuit is based in part on evidence uncovered by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that showed “a group of companies organized a systematic illegal boycott” against X.
The Republican-led committee held a hearing last month to consider whether current laws are “sufficient to prevent anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.”
The allegations in the lawsuit relate to the early days of Musk’s Twitter takeover and not to a more recent dispute with advertisers that arose a year later.
In November 2023, about a year after Musk bought the company, numerous advertisers began leaving X over concerns that their ads might appear alongside pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general. Musk also fueled tensions with his own posts supporting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
Musk later said the fleeing advertisers were engaging in “extortion” and essentially told them – using an euphemism – to leave.
The Belgium-based World Federation of Advertisers and representatives from CVS, Orsted, Mars and Unilever did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
A top Unilever executive testified at a hearing before the US Congress last month, defending the British consumer goods company’s practice of prioritizing advertising on platforms that do not harm its brand.
“Unilever and only Unilever controls our advertising spend,” said a written statement from Herrish Patel, president of Unilever USA. “No platform has a right to our advertising dollars.”
