Social media platform Rumble joined Elon Musk’s X in filing a lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) alleging the global advertising group is violating antitrust laws by illegally boycotting certain companies and platforms.
Rumble CEO and founder Chris Pavolvski said in an appearance on FOX Business Network’s “The Big Money Show” that the World Federation of Advertisers, which created the GARM consortium to serve member advertisers, have improperly used brand safety standards to effectively boycott certain platforms.
“Once you have a huge consortium that creates a monopoly across all the big ad budgets that dictate that brand safety standard, they then can now discriminate against certain voices on other platforms,” Pavolvski said.
“If they don’t like what some speech might happen on Rumble or X, they can say, we’re not going to touch that. Which then causes advertising rates to go higher because now they’re only accessing a certain portion of the market and then drives higher prices for their shareholders and their brands,” he explained.
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“This harms the advertisers, the shareholders, it creates higher fees for the agencies and also harms Rumble creators, and Rumble viewers and the Rumble platform,” he added.
Pavolvski said that the Sherman Act, a federal antitrust law that prohibits anticompetitive agreements and conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize a market, prohibits the sort of activities that GARM has engaged in.
“When you have a monopoly and you create a monopoly by assembling all this power and control to dictate a certain standard of how you’re going to spend that money, that’s not a free market. The Sherman Act does not allow that. so that’s illegal,” he said.
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“There’s different rules and standards when you’re a monopoly. And what the World Federation of Advertisers has done is they created a monopoly to basically tell… all these advertisers how they should spend money based on certain speech. So you can’t use the First Amendment in a way, by having a monopoly to dictate how you’re going to deploy funds. This is harmful to their advertisers,” Pavlovski added.
The World Federation of Advertisers formed GARM in 2019, which is made up of advertisers, agencies, media companies, platforms and industry organizations.
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GARM claims to be “apolitical” and “voluntary” and says that it benefits its members by providing use of “resources and information about best practices to learn where their advertising investments go, and to avoid placement next to illegal or harmful content that could damage their brands’ reputation.”
In discussions about his approach to freedom of speech, GARM leader and co-founder Rob Rakowitz has expressed frustration with an “extreme global interpretation of the U.S. Constitution” and complained about using “‘principles for governance’ and applying them as literal law from 230 years ago (made by white men exclusively).” With that worldview, GARM pushed what it called “uncommon collaboration” to “rise above commercial interest.”
GARM has been accused of working with large companies to implement advertising crackdowns on Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Spotify, political candidates and news outlets, including Fox News, The Daily Wire and Breitbart News.
FOX Business reached out to the World Federation of Advertisers for comment on the lawsuit against GARM.
FOX Business’ Breck Dumas and Fox News’ Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.
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