Elon Musk and X have dealt a blow to the brand safety edifice in advertising as the industry group GARM—the Global Alliance for Responsible Media—folded following a lawsuit from X accusing GARM of colluding to organize an advertising boycott, according to people familiar with the situation.

On Thursday, GARM, the well-known ad industry group that basically invented the standards for content on social media, alerted its members that it would shut down. The end of GARM is likely to be considered a major win for Musk, who has often attacked brands that have tried to rein in X, many of which pulled money from the platform over brand safety concerns.

“If Elon never bought X, or Twitter at the time, none of this would have happened,” said an ad tech executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a close relationship with GARM. “I think Elon single-handedly did this, and I don't think any platforms are upset about it, to be honest.”

GARM had carved out a formidable niche in advertising, pressuring platforms to develop controls for advertisers to steer where their ads run to avoid harmful content. YouTube, Meta, TikTok and others have all worked with the organization, and X did as well, until suing the group this week. GARM, a branch of the World Federation of Advertisers, was formed at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2019, a time when top brands were looking for some way to control the chaos of social media and the internet. YouTube and Facebook were viewed as places advertisers had to spend money or they risked missing large audiences, but brands wanted some power to avoid offensive material and to not monetize illicit content.

More news: Brand safety controls called into question in new report

In late 2022, GARM achieved what was, perhaps, its most important work by helping develop brand safety guardrails for Facebook’s feed. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, adopted standards based on GARM’s definitions of subjects such as hate speech, violence and misinformation, and it allowed advertisers to avoid placing ads against those subjects.

Members of the group, which consists of top brands, marketers, ad tech companies and others, received an email from GARM on Thursday, announcing it was disbanding. Business Insider was the first to report on GARM’s closure.

Early today, GARM issued an official statement about its status. “GARM is a small, not-for-profit initiative, and recent allegations that unfortunately misconstrue its purpose and activities have caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and finances,” the group said in a post on its website. “GARM therefore is making the difficult decision to discontinue its activities.”

The post pointed to GARMs’ work that started in 2019 as a “a voluntary cross-industry initiative.” The group formed in part as a reaction to the Christchurch New Zealand Mosque shooting, after livestreams of the massacre popped up on Facebook. GARM claimed it helped reduced the prevalence of brands appearing alongside illegal or harmful content online—“reducing such ads from 6.1% in 2020 to 1.7% in 2023.”

Future of safety

GARM’s shutdown is not necessarily being viewed as the end of brand safety, as advertisers said they are still going to demand quality control measures. But the brand safety netting is certainly frayed, said the ad tech executive, who credited Musk with serving a blow to the system. GARM was just one piece of an elaborate digital ad ecosystem built to manage brand safety, fraud and viewability across platforms. GARM worked closely with major agency holding companies, including WPP’s GroupM, as well as top marketers such as Unilever, Procter & Gamble and Diageo. The systems they erected to monitor online advertising spurred a proliferation of ad verification firms, such as IAS and DoubleVerify, which brands hire to track when ads appear in unsuitable settings.

However, these verification firms have also been under scrutiny, especially this week following a report from watchdog group Adalytics, which found that the firms were not catching ads that were showing up on some of the darkest forums on the open web. “There’s a lot of layers here,” said the ad tech exec. “A lot of big stuff is all happening at once.”

X has played a substantial role, too, because Musk butted heads with advertisers ever since he bought Twitter in 2022. Advertisers started spending less money on the platform, and some pulled out entirely, due to concerns that Musk would not moderate hate speech on the platform. Musk has always stated that he’s a free speech advocate, and wanted to maintain a light hand over policing content. Musk’s critics have accused him of political machinations, by seeming to favor more conservative voices with his policies and his posts on X.

Cannes Lions 2024: Musk tries to win back advertisers

Musk has sued advocacy groups before that are widely known in media and advertising, including Media Matters and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Musk has claimed that activists have cost X advertising revenue by mischaracterizing the prevalence of objectionable material on the site. GARM became the focus of X’s ire, even though X just last month put out statements about working with the group to address any brand concerns. But also last month, a Republican-led House subcommittee held hearings on GARM with some members claiming it was colluding to “control online speech.”

Dirty laundry

This week, X CEO Linda Yaccarino took to X to announce a lawsuit against GARM and made a video address calling out the group. On Thursday, after GARM went belly up, she posted: “No small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized. This is an important acknowledgment and a necessary step in the right direction. I am hopeful that it means ecosystem-wide reform is coming.”

Musk meanwhile posted an oblique warning on X: “Time to air the dirty laundry!”

Not everyone was sad to see GARM go, saying that it fulfilled its mission by developing the standards that most platforms have adopted, and it didn’t need to continue operating. “Like any committee that outlives its purpose, it tried to create work to justify its existence,” said one top marketer at a major brand, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “GARM was important for a period of time, but it outlived its natural existence and thus created work and issues and drama to justify its existence and purpose.”

GARM seemed to stagnate in the past year, this person said, and it wasn’t evolving to meet new challenges, such as addressing AI and the recent issues raised by verification firms in reports from Adalytics, the advertising watchdog. “GARM was about establishing some standards, but it had outgrown its purpose and only continued so that a bunch of people could get together and critique platforms, and discuss amongst themselves, and have a nice lunch,” this person said.

Still, the demise of GARM is unlikely to change X’s ad fortunes, according to advertising leaders. “[Musk] has got real issues on his platform and it’s not resolved,” said Sheryl Daija, founder of BRIDGE, an independent ad industry trade group focused on DE&I. “You can’t compel advertisers to advertise on your platform if they don’t want to.”

Claire Atkin, co-founder of Check My Ads, another advertising watchdog, agreed that losing GARM won’t stop the work.

“Advertisers know a bad ad placement when they see one,” Atkin said. “The reality is today’s decision means even more advertisers will flee X, and quickly, so they’re not targeted in the future. Everyone can see that advertising on X is a treacherous business relationship for advertisers. And we know, based on public reporting, X doesn’t have all that many to lose.”

“The upside to today’s news is that advertisers will no longer rely on GARM and will now take more direct responsibility over where their ads appear,” Atkin said.

Picking up the pieces

There are lingering questions, though, including how the discontinuation of GARM affects the actual implementation of its standards. DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Zefr all have products built around allowing advertisers to apply various GARM brand safety levels to their media buys. Executives from DV and IAS didn’t immediately respond for comment.

“Today is a sad day for the industry,” said Zefr CEO Rich Raddon. “Zefr entered the brand safety measurement space when GARM was created. GARM established a common framework that allowed for increased transparency and accuracy with brand safety reporting. Let’s hope the industry doesn’t retreat back into the dark ages where every placement, no matter the risk adjacency, is considered 99.9% brand safe. That is equivalent to alternative facts.”

The Coalition for a Safer Web, which at times has been critical of GARM for not doing enough to address online harms, has a plan to fill the void.

In 2020, the coalition started advocating for a Social Media Standards Board, akin to other public oversight boards, which would be made up of social media companies, digital ad industry stakeholders, and concerned citizen groups. This board could create an industry code of conduct enforced by financial penalties with the backing of Congress.

When the House Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas to GARM last year, Eric Feinberg, VP of content moderation for the CSW termed GARM “a check box kind of thing” with limited impact on actually cleaning up harmful content, such as hate speech and drug dealing on social platforms.

But in light of WFA suspending GARM operations, Feinberg said that it is a loss for the industry. “Kids are dying. Antisemitism, hate speech and misinformation are thriving. So what’s going to protect us against this?” He offered the Social Media Standards Board as an alternative, which, with government backing, would sidestep any antitrust issues.