US court dismisses X's antitrust lawsuit over alleged ad boycott

A US judge on Thursday dismissed the antitrust lawsuit filed by the short-messaging platform X. The company, controlled by Elon Musk, had accused the industry association World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and major companies such as Mars, Lego, Nestlé, Pinterest, and the US pharmaceutical group CVS Health of an illegal advertising boycott and demanded damages.

US District Judge Jane Boyle of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas dismissed the lawsuit on Thursday. X had failed to prove that the company had suffered damages under US antitrust law, the court stated as its reasoning.

X had filed the lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and several companies in the summer of 2024. These companies had allegedly conspired through an initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) to jointly boycott advertising on the X platform. This, X claimed, violated US antitrust law.

GARM is an initiative of the industry association World Federation of Advertisers, based in Belgium. Its members are supposed to avoid financially rewarding illegal or harmful content through their advertising and thereby damaging their brand's reputation. At the same time, GARM is intended to promote competition between advertising platforms.

The lawsuit (Case No. 7:24-CV-0114-B) claims that the World Federation of Advertisers organized an advertising boycott against Twitter (now X) following Musk's takeover of Twitter in 2022, in order to compel the short-messaging service to comply with GARM guidelines. With the alleged boycott, the defendants had acted against their own economic interests. X demanded triple the amount of lost advertising revenue plus interest and legal costs. Furthermore, X requested that the court prohibit the defendants from jointly refraining from placing ads on X in the future. In early 2025, X expanded the lawsuit and accused even more corporations of a business-damaging and illegal advertising boycott. The British consumer goods group Unilever settled with X and was removed from the lawsuit.

The defendants rejected any wrongdoing in the proceedings. They argued that X had not been able to prove that they had agreed to act jointly. Instead, the companies had made individual business decisions about when and where they wanted to spend their advertising budgets. "The nature of the alleged conspiracy does not constitute an antitrust violation, which is why the court is definitively dismissing the lawsuit without hesitation," stated Judge Boyle in her order.

• Order in the case X v. World Federation of Advertisers et al.

(akn)