A lawsuit claims that corporate advertisers avoided X as part of a vast left-wing conspiracy. In recent weeks, in his prolific activity on X, the social network he owns, Elon Musk has shared a deepfake of Kamala Harris, calling it “amazing.” He’s shared inflammatory posts about England’s anti-immigrant riots while opining that “civil war is inevitable.” He’s fended off calls from five Democratic secretaries of state to reform Grok, X’s AI bot, after it shared false electoral information. All of this follows years of stalling engagement on the platform and a broader decline under his ownership, as advertisers fled a site newly-receptive to racist pseudoscience, antisemitism, and restoring noxious figures’ accounts. Their departure may have been hastened by Musk advising advertisers, twice, to “go fuck yourself,” during an on-stage New York Times interview. Or it may be because Musk used his privileged position, as a study released Thursday said, to become one of the site’s mostly widely-seen purveyors of election disinformation, racking up 1.2 billion views on the subject between January and July. (…) According to Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Musk “is clearly outraged at the precipitous drop in advertising dollars since he’s taken over… Instead of owning up to the fact that its the change in the content moderation policies that he’s instituted and take responsibility for that, he’s trying to point the finger.” The attention-grabbing antitrust lawsuit accuses the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a WFA project, of engaging in an illegal group boycott against X. The suit specifically names several WFA alliance members, including CVS Health, Mars, Orsted, and Unilever. While the WFA declined a request to comment, according to its website, GARM was founded after the Christchurch mass shooting, when the killer live streamed the attack on Facebook. “This followed a slew of high-profile cases where brands’ advertisements appeared next to illegal or harmful content,” which, the site explains, spurred the initiative’s launch. “For advertisers who have invested heavily in these platforms, the danger of seeing their brands next to harmful content has become a major issue,” a GARM FAQ, which has been pulled down in the last two days, read. “No one wants to be inadvertently funding people intent on causing damage to society.”
via mother jones: Can Elon Musk Really Sue People for Not Wanting to Be Seen With Him?