The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and X have agreed to end their two-year legal dispute over allegations the trade body coordinated an advertising boycott against Elon Musk’s social media platform.
The two organisations have issued a joint statement confirming they will put the litigation behind them and “reset” their relationship. As part of the agreement, the WFA also committed that it “will not form or restart Garm or a similar initiative.”
The outcome is likely to be closely watched by agencies, brands and media owners across the North, many of whom have relied on industry-wide brand safety standards to help inform where advertising budgets are spent and how online risk is managed.
The lawsuit, filed by X in August 2024, accused the WFA, its now-defunct Global Alliance for Responsible Media (Garm) initiative and a number of major advertisers of conspiring to withhold advertising spend from the platform following Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
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X argued that Garm’s responsible media framework restricted competition and cost the platform billions of dollars in advertising revenue. The WFA consistently denied orchestrating a boycott, maintaining that Garm provided voluntary brand safety standards while advertisers made their own independent decisions about where to spend their budgets.
However, a federal judge in Texas dismissed the case in March this year, ruling that X had failed to demonstrate the antitrust injury required to support its claim.
Garm was launched by the WFA in 2019 following the Christchurch mosque attacks, with the aim of bringing together advertisers, agencies and technology companies to develop common standards for harmful online content and improve brand safety across digital platforms.
The initiative was shut down just days after X launched its legal action in 2024, with the WFA saying defending the case had placed an unsustainable strain on its resources.
The legal dispute became one of the most high-profile clashes between the advertising industry and Musk’s X, against the backdrop of an increasingly strained relationship between the platform and advertisers. During the dispute, X expanded its lawsuit to include a number of global brands, although Unilever later reached a separate agreement and was removed from the case.
Neither side has disclosed whether the settlement includes any financial payment or admission of wrongdoing.
In their joint statement, the organisations said: “WFA reiterates its commitment to freedom of speech, a principle first included in WFA’s founding constitution back in 1953 and a principle it shares with X.”
Despite confirming Garm will not return, the statement added: “WFA and X are fully aligned in the view that brands, platforms and consumers will all benefit from brand-safety innovation.”
The agreement brings an end to a closely watched dispute but also leaves the advertising industry without the cross-platform standards body that previously brought together many of the world’s largest advertisers, agencies and technology companies.
Commenting on the settlement, Sean Japp, director of Mostly Media, told The Drum: “The closure of Garm was significant because it removed one of the few industry-wide attempts to create common standards around brand safety. This feels less like a reset and more like a permanent retreat from collective action.”
Japp added: “Advertisers choosing where to spend their money is also a legitimate commercial decision. Brands and agencies have every right to consider the environment in which their advertising appears, the content they may inadvertently fund and the reputational risk attached to a platform.”
He continued: “A platform can support open expression while also giving advertisers meaningful control, transparency and confidence over where their campaigns run.”
Media agency veteran Nick Manning also told The Drum the case was “always a one-sided affair, with infinite resources versus the slender means of the WFA.”
He added: “The reality is that the WFA’s members do not and never have worked in concert and take individual decisions in their own best interests. One of those is to avoid media platforms that algorithmically amplify the worst kind of content behind the figleaf of ‘free speech.'”
