Fyi... a commenter[1] in a reddit thread focused on whether the alleged collusion tried to "extort something of economic value from Twitter/X" -- such as forcing Twitter to offer cheaper ad pricing. An association watchdog like GARM telling their members that a social platform is unsafe for their brand and causing them to pull advertising from it isn't an example of extorting a thing of value from Twitter.
I don't know if his legal analysis is correct but it sounds interesting.
Right — this use of the Sherman Act implies that advertisers were attempting to collude to force Twitter into lower ad prices for an eventual return, when all available evidence suggests that Twitter’s advertising segment is toxic to their public image and thus not worth any money at all.
I think the closest comparison would be 4chan complaining that they can’t charge more for ads: ads are cheap on 4chan not because of collusion, but because virtually no company wants their brand associated with 4chan’s content.
> when all available evidence suggests that Twitter’s advertising segment is toxic to their public image and thus not worth any money at all.
This is in contradiction with the argument put forward by the lawsuit: that brands were willing to boycott X only as long as they were sure their competitors were doing the same. If it were true that brands avoid X because "it's toxic to their public image", then they should be delighted to know that their competitors are still advertising there!
At the end of the day it's supply and demand. When company A stops advertising it creates less demand so company B gets a lower price which may make advertising "worthwhile" again.
Assuming that companies were just distributing their marketing budget elsewhere twitter essentially became an outside option for companies that were willing to bear the "risks".
"worth less money" is not the same as "worth no money at all" as the gp wrote. If X were toxic to brand value, ads on X could only sell for a negative amount of money.
That's not really the operative part of my comment. It's my opinion that Twitter advertising is worth nothing, but it's clear that it's still worth something to the people who still pay for it. Just not as much as Twitter thinks it's worth.
> it's still worth something to the people who still pay for it.
Sorry, you're being deliberately obtuse here. If what the lawsuit claims is true (irrespective of whether it's legal or not), ads on Twitter are still worth something also to those who DO NOT pay for them, because otherwise they would not need to collude with their competitors to make sure they're also boycotting.
I'm not saying that this can be proved to be an anti-competitive behaviour. Just that it destroys the narrative of "ads on Twitter are a negative value for the brands that advertise there".
The question I have is how many advertisers that pulled out, that actively posted on Twitter under a brand account, ceased posting under said account and/or deleted it outright? I would assume if Twitter is too toxic of a platform to advertise on, then they would want to cease brand association entirely no?
My understanding is that Twitter allows for username reuse, so a major company deleting their account would be an even greater brand risk than just letting it go idle.
(But even if the account doesn’t go idle: I think there’s a significant difference in kind between a company’s account being generally active and paying for advertising to appear next to increasingly extreme and negative content.)
These are effectively different spaces, all major corporations will have accounts on Twitter and post stuff so you're in good company, or at least amongst a broad variety of users.
Sponsored content would be side by side with (last time I checked) crypto scams and porn. There's actually a risk of devaluing your brand by promoting it alongside tat.
> Sponsored content would be side by side with (last time I checked) crypto scams and porn. There's actually a risk of devaluing your brand by promoting it alongside tat.
Are you saying X/Twitter doesn't let you choose whether or not your ad is displayed with adult content? Or doesn't let you choose content categories to run it against or not?
I thought most advertising platforms let advertisers choose which content categories to run (or not run) the ad for–e.g. "I only want this ad displayed on content related to motor vehicles, fishing or firearms". Or even keywords – e.g. "don't run this ad on any content mentioning [competitor_name]"
Is being placed next to other random content a real risk? Or is it just portrayed like that by a vocal minority that likes to deplatform? I don’t see why a random person outside of HN or political activism would associate two different pieces of content on the same page.
It's not random though, it's the determined content for Twitter's target marketing demographics. Wrestling had this issue for years trying to attract new advertisers. The ones that were already there were firmly for less in demand demographics that more greatly represented wrestling's historical viewership and their presence had the effect of making it a less attractive option for higher status brands.
A random person outside of HN mightn't consciously notice anything, a marketer absolutely will and they'll notice how all these kinds of factors will impact the efficacy of a campaign actually increasing sales rather than just being viewed
I don't really see how this would be that relevant. A corporate account making announcements and ads are pretty different in content, cost, perception, etc.
The conduct that the Sherman Act prohibits is broader than what you are describing. But even if it were not, the thing of value that is allegedly being extorted here is control over brand safety policies. The advertisers are accused by X of colluding with competitors to use their combined market power to deprive X of more revenue than if each advertiser made its decision independently.
I don't necessarily agree with the lawsuit, but those are the legal issues at play.
It would divert the ad spend from X to the NYT and other traditional media though, so you could argue they have something to gain from the boycott. News outlets have lost a lot of money to social media companies the past two decades.
My understanding of the Sherman Act’s restrictions on collective boycotting is that they depend on evidence of non-competitive collusion between companies that would ordinarily compete in a market. But GARM’s actions don’t on face value meet either prong of that definition: it’s not clear that the companies have colluded to boycott Twitter, or that buying ad space on Twitter is comparable to competing in their actual market segments (the things they’re buying advertising space for). Or to make it intuitive: seeing that your competitors also don’t pay for a service isn’t collusion; it’s market research.
But even if these conditions were somehow met: what’s the legal relief here? Surely a court can’t compel Coca-Cola (or whoever) into a minimum amount of ad spending on a particular social media site.
> But what turns this into illegal collusion, the X lawsuit argues, is when businesses make those decisions contingent on cooperation with competitors.
So the same as for price fixing. It's legal to set your own price, but can be illegal to agree to do that with competitors even at the same price.
I’m not seeing where it’s evidenced that this is what’s actually happening. Twitter’s lawyers can put whatever rationale they want in their suit, but it’s not even remotely clear to me that company $FOO only stopped advertising on Twitter because they conferred with competitor $BAR. If anything, the fact that the lawsuit is against CAGM indicates the opposite: $FOO observed a general disinvestment in advertising on Twitter, and deduced through normal market research that their ad spend wasn’t worth it.
Maybe discovery will reveal collusion here, but it relies on an unlikely premise: companies with significant ad spend have entire teams dedicated to PR, and it would be astonishing if they couldn’t provide independent internal research demonstrating the risk Twitter posed to their brand as a sufficient reason to stop paying for ads.
> companies with significant ad spend have entire teams dedicated to PR, and it would be astonishing if they couldn’t provide independent internal research demonstrating the risk Twitter posed to their brand as a sufficient reason to stop paying for ads.
Do you really believe that hundreds of social science teams would reach the same conclusion at the same time independently of each other, like these hundreds of advertisers did?
Social science isn't that exact, there would be big brands not leaving if they acted independently, or at least they wouldn't all leave at the same time.
No; I believe that these companies have advertising teams that monitor the value of their investments, and that these teams are excruciatingly attuned to potential brand risks. You don’t need imperfect social science to understand that the majority of your consumers don’t like it when your ads appear next to content that looks like it could have come from Der Sturmer.
Yea, it doesn't take a crack social science team or shadowy conspiracy to figure out that most brands do not want to be associated with the alt-right and everything in the alt-right's orbit. It is totally plausible that thousands of companies would come to the same conclusion without conspiring together.
I found the case and checked the prayer for relief to see what they are asking for. Declaration that the so-called collusion was illegal, money damages, and an injunction to stop them from further colluding to not buy ads.
The last bit... Surely the court wouldn't want to force these companies to continue to advertise against their will on a platform that can sue them for not advertising? Monetary damage make sense if twitter prevails though.
So this non-lawyer read the initial complaint, looked into two cases, and thinks he has a meaningful understanding of how the lawsuit is going to go? Why is some random layman's opinion given any weight here?
OP here. Initially I was not going to respond to your comment, because you are right, I am not a lawyer. My background is in journalism. I would not trust me to represent anyone, including myself, in a legal proceeding.
However, after thinking it through a little bit more, I did want to say something in my own defense, so that your comment doesn't discourage anyone else who is curious by nature.
This was a topic that piqued my curiosity, and so I put in the time to read the filing and research other relevant court cases. I did not mention them all in my blog post, but I did a fair amount of review of case law that might be relevant here. Likewise, in my books, I review academic studies and then put them in plain language that a general readership can understand.
Isn't this what we should be encouraging on Hacker News? "Hey, there was a subject I was curious about, so I endeavored to learn a little more about it; doing so led me to update my priors, and here is what I know now." Dismissing that because I lack the right credentials feels a little gate-keepy.
I'm not claiming to be a legal expert. I merely learned something about the law and published it in case it piques someone else's interest as well. The title of the post makes it clear that the point is about me realizing my assumptions were inaccurate, not about what I think the outcome of the case will be.
While I agree with your statement here, in the future you could anticipate these sorts of objections with a standard disclaimer :) -- something I intent to do myself after reading all these posts. Its extra work but necessary given that there's always someone that will object.
That’s usually part of my evaluation on whether something is worth taking seriously. The difficulty is going down that road, you’ll nullify a great portion of what’s posted here and elsewhere. To put it bluntly, people talk out of their ass.
Some people call it credentialism and they think an argument should be able to stand on its own. And those that think this, you’re welcome to have someone who isn’t a trained surgeon operating on your heart just because they make a convincing argument as to where the problem is and what the fix is. I’ll go with the bloke who is trained and has a few surgeries under their belt.
Some arguments are absolutely able to stand on their own, particularly in fields where credentials don’t necessarily hold any value. A doctor is far more vetted than a stockbroker, for example, and that stockbroker is unlikely to make any major returns on their costumer’s investments, even with good “knowledge” of the market. They certainly won’t go much higher than the market averages without major insider knowledge. Credentials can only go so far, especially when you can get credentials in a fair amount of fields without any practical knowledge or understanding of said subject.
The countering question is: why does the economic/legal model have to be so over-engineered that nobody outside the Priesthood is capable of grasping the nuances?
One should think that keeping the complexity minimized would be a goal of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive society.
That's an interesting question, but not a good counterquestion. Your question acknowledges and accepts that the legal system is too complex for us to give weight to a layman's opinion, and hence is completely in agreement with your parent question. A counterquestion, albeit a poor one, would be "is the economic/legal model so overengineered that no one outside the priesthood is capable of grasping the nuances?" The question is loaded and the answer to the non-loaded version is obvious, so it's not a great counterquestion.
If the legal system runs athwart the lay opinion, there ought to be some wisdom driving the tension, and that wisdom ought to be better explained than "Shut up, peasant."
Fair enough - but the place it will be explained is in the judge's decision. We don't have that yet.
So all we have is a lay opinion, and others of us recognizing that it's a lay opinion and may well not hold water. That's not "Shut up, peasant", that's "You're a peasant just like us, so we don't think you actually know any better than we do."
It's a noble goal but the reality is the world is obscenely complex, and made evermore complex by adversarial forces trying to blow holes in each others' cases.
But is it realistic to get to a point where laymen across the board have a clear understanding of every facet of the law, even with great communication? Or is it so complicated that you’ll just have to defer to those that have spent years training in it?
To the other person’s point, I’m not convinced that it’s overengineered per se, it just deals with an incredibly complex system.
I always thought the pretenses for this lawsuit were extremely thin.
Now that I see GARM was shuttered as a result of financial pressures from the lawsuit, I believe this was this was actually the goal all along. It didn’t matter that the reason was flimsy. It just had to pass muster.
What I don't understand and perhaps someone could clarify: does this stop the lawsuit? Do they hope it will? If it doesn't stop it, why discontinue GARM at all, what difference does it make?
I am guessing they will make an argument the lawsuit is now moot and seek to get it dismissed before damaging information comes out through the legal process. For example imagine a witness on stand sharing how there was indeed collusion between competitors in advertising, with the goal of suppressing political speech broadly in our democratic society, all coordinated by hiding the collusion via a nonprofit they all work with. It would be a huge scandal and make it very clear that these companies are too big and powerful and untrustworthy.
I think they were shuttered because they realized that the lawsuit had legal merit. Shutting down the operation was the simplest way to limit liability.
How would this work if you’re dependent on a legal bad thing for your business, and that thing is way cheaper than the alternative? Let’s say you’re poisoning everyone who swims in your favorite local lake but it’s somehow legal. You and your competitors probably want to switch to a non-poison process, but none of you can because if you do, you’ll go out of business.
The usual solution is cooperation instead of competition, where you all agree you don’t want to poison everyone so you’ll switch processes. But is this saying that that is sometimes illegal?
If so, it seems like the race-to-the-bottom we all know and hate is a legal inevitability.
This seems like possibly a winning strategy for anyone who is simultaneously deplatformed, debarked, etc. as well.
It’s hard to disagree that there are pariahs that you’d not want as customers. On the other hand, I’d much rather live a world where the phone company operates phones and sells access to networks, ISPs sell server space, banks deal with financial instruments, and all of them leave their social, political, or moral stances to themselves. I don’t go to my local retailer for a lecture on the social injustice of the month. The idea of a Reddit style world where if you participate in one community, regardless of your behavior, you’ll be banned from another is about as distopian as it gets.
I don’t think it makes sense to include X or any other social media in the same category as those lower level infrastructure services.
I’d describe my feelings about the advertising boycott as very mixed, and think it’s worth maintaining a clear distinction between these categories of service. I’d find it equally dystopian to live in an environment that doesn’t allow companies to take a principled stance against obvious abuse or to stop spending money when a company goes through dramatic changes that fundamentally alter the advertising environment.
What I’m most curious about is whether or not the boycotts were truly contingent vs. just centrally organized.
I wasn’t trying to relate the two directly. The ADL has a list, for example, that many companies that are competitors in different markets use to inflict financial and/or business consequences on those who are added to the list. It would seem that would count as per se contingent.
On the one hand, some on that list are abhorrent. On the other hand, some just disagree with the positions of the ADL and the ADL knows it can turn screws on those that cross their path. That power seems unacceptable, and apparently may be illegal.
Should those not convicted of any crime, living freely in society, be prohibited from buying milk at a grocery store because their words or ideas are considered incorrect by some self selected taste makers? If you disagreed with those with the power to make those lists would you feel the same way?
According to the article, the only part illegal about "simultaneously deplatforming" someone would be if the action were coordinated by competitors ("we'll ban John Smith if you do too"). I don't think there would be an argument with the same legal reasoning if platforms independently decided to deplatform someone, or even if they saw another platform deplatform someone and let that influence their decision.
The Reddit example might be closer to the type of coordination it targets, but it would be hard to apply anti-monopoly legislation to volunteer Reddit mods.
There's a sharp difference between the other examples you list (aside from perhaps Reddit) and X.
When a person posts an antisemitic on X, the people who notice said post do not know with any certainty what ISP was used, so there's nothing to associate the post with a given ISP. Furthermore, even if readers did know what ISP was used, the general assumption (correct or no) is that ISPs don't monitor traffic going through their pipes, so they neither know nor can control what data is sent over the wire, thus absolving them of any responsibility for what someone decides to post on X.
Contrast this with X itself. As the host of said message, there's a direct link between the content seen and X. As X already moderates content on its platform, a claim can be made that it bears responsibility for posts that are left up for any significant amount of time. The fact X sells ad space which appears next to the hosted content only reinforces this responsibility.
If you prefer to deal with a meatspace analogy: consider a billboard company. Should someone rent space on a billboard in a widely-visible area and paint a giant penis on it, most onlookers would disapprove, and they'd foster a growing discontent with the company the longer it's left up. However, few, if any, would attack the nearby Lowe's or Home Depot for selling paint and paint brushes that could have been used for the picture or go after the city for daring to build and maintain the roads allowing access to the billboard.
X is a digital billboard company. They aren't neutral here: they're actively aiding you in getting your message in front of more people with the hope that any engagement your message triggers will increase ad revenue.
In my opinion, this is just a perspective pushed by very online political activists that want to push this idea that two different companies associating with each other through spending means their brands are jointly responsible for the content of one of them. But they aren’t. They are separate entities. It doesn’t matter to me if a company like Coca-Cola or Apple shows an ad next to some other content I dislike or on a platform I dislike.
True or not, almost everyone in the marketing profession believes that you don't want your brand associated in any way with toxicity or negativity, so that's going to drive the actions of advertisers. If a platform permits content that advertisers do not accept, they are going to respond predictably, whether or not we think it's fair or right.
Why? It sounds like a huge loss for free speech to me. it seems bizarre that it could be illegal to encourage boycotts based on political opinions. Was the Bud Light boycott also illegal?
This isn't about "encouraging boycotts", it's about business competitors colluding to weild their market power for political reasons. No one is saying that individual companies shouldn't be able to make their own decisions---it's the collusion. In this case, the collusion was allegedly orchestrated by GARM.
Citizens United suggests to me that these businesses are acting as legal persons in this case, choosing when and how they allocate money. Persons can collude to boycott.
Are you saying competitors serving same market segment must not come to the same conclusions so as to where to advertise and where not? Because that would be political?
> X is arguing that whenever you have a group of companies that are competitors, and they take an action that is contingent on their competitor's cooperation ("I'll boycott if and only if you do the same"), then that is, on its face, an anti-competitive action that violates the Sherman Act, which prohibits "restraint of trade."
You imply they have put in place any contingencies/enforcement against non-cooperating companies? I don't expect that wil be shown in the case. The advertisers just got together to define voluntary guidelines where to advertise and where to draw the line. Anyone was free to ignore the guidelines at their own peril(their ads shown next to filthy material).
He sued the nonprofit out of existence because they encouraged (not forced) companies not to advertise on his platform as he told them all to go fuck themselves. If that sounds like a free speech win, you might be the kind of genius who should start a car or rocket company.
They haven't paid any judgement or do anything but engage lawyers. The monetary cost so far has been minimal. The fact that they folded immediately told me that they worried about losing and they wanted to minimize their liability.
That's exactly what Musk has claimed, and supposedly his reason for buying Twitter. It's also a common refrain from bigots of all types: "saying all non-whites are dishonest lazy violent criminals isn't bigotry, it's a political position!"
You used to see this shit on slashdot back in the early aughts and it's just as tiresome today.
Musk asked (in his own special way) companies with a marketing budget available to use on Twitter to leave when they raised concerns. They took up his offer.
Maybe the richest man in the world wanted to be able to play the victim (again).
The marketing associations include purchasers, advertising/marketing agencies, and yes, other ad providers.
> colluding
You need to look up that word in the dictionary. An industry trade group publicly announcing (with press releases and an entire website) something is not collusion.
> for political reasons
"Twitter doesn't do anything about hate speech, has re-instated numerous people whose sole identity is gender, racial, sexual orientation, and ethnicity based bigotry and the CEO repeatedly makes white supremacist comments - and thus the platform is not safe for our members or brands or in line with their policies/'values'" is not "political."
Musk is a supposed free speech absolutist/purist. To an extreme degree, I might add; he claims even a social media company deplatforming people is a violation of someone's free speech rights and was his motivation for purchasing Twitter. Yet he routinely bans people from his platform for even mentioning unflattering things about him or his companies, and conveniently seems to forget that freedom of association is part of the first amendment.
Then there's the journalist-banning bender Twitter has been on since Musk bought it which is not at all compatible with being a first amendment extreme absolutist. The fact that the Kingdom of Saud was a major financial backer in the purchase and really, really doesn't like the platform twitter provides for journalists has nothing to do with all of this /s
At least he's consistent about being inconsistent.
I have mixed feelings here. I find the advertisers' position in this particular case fairly reasonable. The last time I followed a link to a Twitter post, one of the first comments depicted American politicians bowing before a caricature of a Jew draped in an Israeli flag. If I was running ads, I think I wouldn't want my brand to appear next to that. Musk's response to advertisers saying so was literally to tell them to go fuck themselves. If someone were to say that to me, I probably wouldn't do business with them anymore.
On the other hand, there's a trend for social media platforms lately to downrank anything that's not advertiser-friendly whether it's Facebook posts containing profanity or Youtube videos about guns. I don't think tech billionaires suing each other about it is an ideal resolution, but I don't like this trend.
The lawsuit says that companies are free to leave the platform based on their own independent judgments. It argues that antitrust law prohibits the companies from making an agreement with their competitors about whether to do so.
I've been told multiple times 'vote with your wallet'. That's a typical neolib/neocon saying.
Organize yourselves to vote with your wallet? Illegal! Kill this idea with fire! Sue them! They're Hamas/Marxist/anticapitalists! We can't allow them to organize!
'Back in my days, we had a sense of community, we had more meaningful relationships'
I doubt this kind of people are dumb enough to not see their hypocrisy, so I have to believe it's purposeful.
The problem here- if I understand correctly- is not that companies were voting with their wallets, even together. The problem is that they were willing to do it only as long as all the others were doing the same. Some companies standing by their principles, and willing to pay the price for it, is one thing. Making sure that nobody else benefits from the space you leave is another.
Sorry, I should have added nuance : illegal for unions and non-profits, mostly immoral for individuals, the only moral and legal boycott is BUD is what I learned from USians.
Do you have an alternate source that describes this? The article here says the non profit was disbanded due to financial drain from the lawsuit. Plus there is no federal anti-SLAPP statute.
2. GARM is about the size of 2 people working out of a conference room once a month. This isnt a large organization, this is a trade association. They folded because there is no money to support fighting a Bully Litigant
3. Elon has a history of suing small organizations out of existance with frivelous lawsuits that drain the company's coffers.
That seems like the exact opposite of the takeaway here. Rich people who successfully destroy opposition with lawsuits should not be seen as “in the right” just because they have billions to spend silencing people.
In the wake of Mr. Musk’s acquisition, GARM recommended that advertisers pause their spending, and several major companies, including CVS and Unilever, did so. Those two companies were also named in X’s suit.
The lawsuit seems like a slam dunk for X.
Why does Unilever need a consultant for this? It is obvious: You don't want your washing powder ad to appear next to controversial content? Then either a) negotiate with Twitter to make the ad appear selectively or b) come to your own conclusion not to advertise at all or c) or publicly state that you do not want to sell to Republicans at all.
But this whole state of affairs that there are increasingly single authorities for determining who can post what on the Internet is alarming.
or (d) consult with an industry/sector group that does its own independent assessment of the likelihood of any advertising restrictions and limitations that you request of Twitter actually being honored, and when they say "very little chance", decide not to use that advertising platform.
I don't know if his legal analysis is correct but it sounds interesting.
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