Many people believe that we live in a free market environment when it comes to information. They might be quite surprised to learn about some of the hidden strings.

For example, ever since mercurial entrepreneur Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, many guardians of public information have made no secret of their wish to shut it down.

Few of them seem to care that the U.S. government had secretly interfered with the platform to censor dissenting experts during the COVID scare. Many were obviously piqued that Musk “laid off most of its trust and safety workers (censors) and stopped adding labels to posts from elected officials.” In short, there was less censorship.

X gets by with Community Notes, which simply add context. That has been found to be an effective way to deal with actual false information in medical matters, for example. The “misinformation” that upsets so many pundits is a far more questionable and highly politicized category, as anyone who has studied the use of the concept during the COVID era knows.

The public face of the anti-X campaign has amounted to a great deal of advance doomsaying:

How It Started: Financial Times said Elon would “fail to save Twitter” and X was dying “a slow and tedious death.”

How It’s Going: Their Associate Editor calls it “the largest and most influential platform”. pic.twitter.com/24J2htz7Jv

— Warren Redlich – Chasing Dreams (@WR4NYGov) August 6, 2024

Top level boycott reported to Congress

But there is a little-discussed other face as well: top level pressure on advertisers not to advertise on the medium.

The New York Post — one of the targets — explains:

WASHINGTON — A damning new congressional report shows how a little-known advertising cartel that controls 90% of global marketing spending supported efforts to defund news outlets and platforms including The Post — at points urging members to use a blacklist compiled by a shadowy government-funded group that purports to guard news consumers against “misinformation.”

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which reps 150 of the world’s top companies — including ExxonMobil, GM, General Mills, McDonald’s, Visa, SC Johnson and Walmart — and 60 ad associations sought to squelch online free speech through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, the House Judiciary Committee found in an interim report released Wednesday.

Steven Nelson, “Bombshell report details how a little-known corporate cartel targets outlets — including The Post — claimed to be spreading ‘misinformation’,” New York Post, July 11, 2024 Here’s the Report.

According to the Post, “WFA’s members account for roughly 90% of all global advertising spending – totaling nearly $1 trillion per year.”

No surprise that X was a target of the “Do Not Advertise” list. From the House Judiciary Committee media release:

GARM directed its members to boycott Twitter after Elon Musk acquired the company. Although Rob Rakowitz, the leader of GARM, denied having done so in his transcribed interview before the Committee, a GARM member documented discussions about the boycott, noting that the company had pulled advertisements from Twitter based on GARM’s recommendations.

(July 10, 2024)

Musk, of course, threatened to sue: “Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, X has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket. Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.”

X CEO Linda Yaccarino, announcing the suit, explained,

… even despite the boycott, usage has reached all time highs. Using a Twitter legacy metric, user active minutes, in August 2022, people spent 7.2 billion active minutes on the platform. Today, that number is more than 9 billion, a 25% increase.

The same is true for video – even compared to last year, daily video views are up 45% to 8.2 billion. X is innovating and growing.

She offered some figures:

Traffic Update

→ .com's traffic has increased by 10.41% compared to last month.

→ The organic search traffic is up by 16%. pic.twitter.com/TMxucAzibR

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) August 8, 2024

So the users are increasing but the advertisers are sitting it out, perhaps waiting for direction from GARM, whose activities may not even be legal. They may wait long; after news of the lawsuit, GARM has reportedly disbanded.

X as a new type of news medium?

The Top People’s demand for censorship of wrongthink hampers innovation at X. That’s a pity because it’s entirely possible that X — where everyone is the journalist — is a new development in news media. Hence the public gloating from legacy media over any hint of bad news. Stay tuned.

You may also wish to read: Three key takeaways from the Twitter Files and their fallout. Twitter Files 7 dropped yesterday and it features the close relationship between Twitter and the FBI. Even top execs at Twitter were perhaps not fully in accord with what the government, Big Business, and Big Tech wanted. How many felt forced to do it anyway?

and

Three more key takeaways from the Twitter Files and their fallout. The FBI responds to the Twitter files: “Conspiracy theorists” are feeding the public “misinformation.” This isn’t helping its reputation. The mainstream media react to censorship at last (but only of its own precious little stars) and there is new information about how badly run Twitter was.