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XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns

https://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2025/08/04/has-pressure- on-advertisers-to-leave-x-hurt-the-rights-only-major-free-speech-platform- n2661350

Twitter was failing when Elon Musk purchased the social media platform in October 2022. He radically changed it — deliberately renaming it X to distinguish the platform as something far broader. He sought to make X
fair by helping independent journalists and creators make money from the platform by sharing advertising revenues. But pressure from progressives
made advertisers flee, so Musk filed a lawsuit to bring them back.

Progressives had convinced advertisers that Musk’s elimination of
Twitter’s biased censorship of conservatives — including allowing figures
like President Donald Trump back on the platform — would allow
disinformation, hate speech, and offensive content. The boycott resulted
in a reported 55-60% drop in U.S. ad revenue from 2022 to 2023.

However, hypocritically, Musk’s alignment with Trump after the 2024
election boosted investor confidence and encouraged some advertisers to reconsider X, with a projected 25% increase in ad spending from agencies
in February. Since Musk took the company private, figures are mostly
estimates or what he reveals.

X cultivated new advertisers, with 46 of the top 100 U.S. advertisers in January new to the platform since 2022, including brands like Temu, NFL, DraftKings, Amazon, and Dell.

Musk sharply denounced the advertiser exodus, famously telling advertisers
to “go f**k yourself” at a 2023 New York Times DealBook Summit and
accusing them of blackmail. His rhetoric escalated when he filed a
lawsuit, declaring “now it is war” against advertisers.

X’s revenue is recovering — 16.5% ad growth in 2025 — but is roughly half
of Twitter’s 2021 peak. X is estimated to have as many as 611 million
monthly active users globally, according to sources like DemandSage, up
from 368 million in 2022. Subscriptions, such as X Premium, are expected
to contribute 10-15% of revenue this year.

Twitter’s revenue in 2021 was approximately $5.08 billion, primarily from advertising (89%), with the rest from data licensing and other sources.
Twitter carried a significant debt load of about $5.5 billion as of mid-
2022. In 2021, it reported a net loss of $221 million. Growth was stagnant during the last few years of Twitter.

Musk took out $13 billion in loans when he acquired the platform, which
likely increased the debt. Its net loss in 2025 may be comparable to 2021,
with estimates as low as $220 million.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee suspected illegal collusion to boycott
X coordinated by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which
was formed by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), and conducted an investigation in July 2024 titled “Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.” The committee released an interim staff report titled “GARM’s Harm: How the World’s Biggest Brands Seek to Control Online
Speech” on July 10, 2024.

GARM was formed by WFA in 2019 as a flagship project of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Its stated goal was to create a “common understanding” in the advertising industry of “what harmful and sensitive content is” as well as “where ads should not appear.” The WEF is an unelected, elitist group of wealthy corporate and political leaders attempting to shape global
policies without governmental accountability.

The congressional report stated, “GARM’s internal documents show that GARM
was asked by a member to ‘arrange a meeting and hear more about [GARM’s] perspectives about the Twitter situation and a possible boycott from many companies.” After its effort, GARM “bragged about” the fact that Twitter
was “80% below revenue forecasts.” GARM’s leader and co-founder, Rob
Rakowitz, once complained in an email that the Constitution was written
“by white men exclusively.”

The report alleged that GARM likely violated federal antitrust laws by
limiting consumer choice through coordinated demonetization, describing collusion as “the supreme evil of antitrust.” The report also found that
GARM pressured Spotify over Joe Rogan’s podcast, due to his position that healthy people don’t need the COVID-19 vaccine.

A month later, X filed an antitrust lawsuit in Texas against WFA and GARM, along with companies including Unilever, Mars, CVS Health, and Ørsted. The lawsuit claimed these entities engaged in a “systematic illegal boycott,” conspiring to withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue from X
after Musk’s takeover, violating U.S. antitrust laws by coordinating a
boycott due to concerns over loosened content moderation and brand safety. Internal GARM documents revealed discussions about enforcing brand safety standards — a broad, vague phrase used to justify suppressing conservative speech — which X said were used to justify the boycott.

The lawsuit and congressional investigation led to the dissolution of GARM
in August 2024, with the group citing resource strain from the litigation
as the reason for shutting down. Then-X CEO Linda Yaccarino said this was evidence of GARM’s wrongdoing.

In February 2025, X broadened the lawsuit to include additional major
brands such as Lego, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate- Palmolive, Pinterest, and Shell International, alleging they participated
in the boycott orchestrated by GARM.

The defendant companies filed a motion to dismiss in May, claiming they
didn’t coordinate to halt the advertising.

Some companies, like Unilever, were dropped from the lawsuit after signing
new ad deals, and others, such as Verizon, committed to significant ad
spending ($10 million) after receiving litigation warnings.

Despite MSM hype that users fled X since Musk took over to find refuge
with far-left Bluesky, Bluesky is failing. Bluesky officially launched in
2023, and by early 2025 had only a miserly 30 million users by the most favorable estimates. Only 2.7 million reportedly left X after Musk took
over, and Bluesky gained about 2.5 million in that time.

Unlike X, which Musk has cultivated to treat both the right and left
fairly, something no other major social media platform does — the rest all cater to the left exclusively and censor the right — Bluesky is a bastion
of leftist hate. Even leftist billionaire Mark Cuban said the platform is
full of “agree with me or you are a nazi fascist” and users have "grown
ruder and more hateful.”


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November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump. We look
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

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