Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Thursday that he will open an investigation into the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to determine whether members of the trade group conspired to boycott “certain social media platforms.” While the press release does not mention the social media platforms by name, one of them is likely Elon Musk’s X, which filed an antitrust lawsuit against the WFA in August and alleged that advertisers orchestrated a “systematic illegal boycott” of the platform.
“Commercial organizations and companies cannot collude to block advertising revenue from entities they wish to undermine,” Paxton said in the press release. “Today’s document request is part of an ongoing investigation to hold the WFA and its members accountable for any attempts to manipulate the system to harm organizations with which they may not agree.”
Several of the WFA members, which includes global brands such as IBM, The Coca-Cola Company and CVS Health, have paused or significantly reduced the amount they spend on advertising at X since Elon Musk acquired the company. There was an especially large exodus of advertisers, including Apple and Disney, from X in November 2023 following reports from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Affairs suggesting Elon Musk’s X had failed to moderate its platform and remove illegal content or hateful. At the time, a White House spokesperson condemned Elon Musk for one of his personal posts, which he called “anti-Semitic and racist.”
Since then, The Texas AG is filing a lawsuit of his own.
“It’s still a major issue,” Musk said in response to Paxton’s post Thursday on X about the advertiser’s investigation.
Like X’s lawsuit, Paxton focuses on a since-discontinued nonprofit organization 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 largest advertisers in the country. Created frameworks and definitions for companies to understand hate speech, brand safety, and misinformation.
The AG’s investigations request documents and information from GARM that could reveal whether it told brands to boycott certain social media platforms that violated its brand safety standards.