This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
You can sue people for choosing not to do business with you?
Musk is such a fucking baby. He has no basis for this. He made major changes to the site, including a complete rebrand, and advertisers left. That's the fucking free market, and he's gonna sue?
Even funnier, he literally told advertisers to go fuck themselves lol. Now he goes whining back to Mommy for new rules for his little kingdom.
He can sue, but he won't win in any sane court.
No sane court? So it has a real chance of being decided by The Supreme Court...
They'd never even hear it. To give this lawsuit any credibility, they'd have to effectively say that businesses spending/donating money is not free speech. Which would effectively be the opposite of Citizens United.
You think they give a shit about consistency?
All that matters is the sponsorship tier - will you be flying the judge out to a vacation? Buying their mother a house? The outcome is solely dependent on your investment in the court. Justice.
Maybe they’ll say billionaires can sue as long as it’s an official act.
You can sue people for choosing not to do business with you?
You can sue people for whatever you want. But that's not what they're suing them for, if you actually read the article. They're suing for collusion.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a video announcement that the lawsuit stemmed in part from evidence uncovered by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, which she said showed a "group of companies organized a systematic illegal boycott" against X.
The Republican-led committee had a hearing last month looking at whether current laws are "sufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion in online advertising."
I don't know if that's illegal or not.
Ah yes, the pinnacle of small govt: legislating how advertisers spend their money when they won't spend that money on Republican platforms
It would make an interesting precedent. Bud Light can then sue over the boycott with the whole LGBTQ thing because some didn't buy their beer. Celebrities being cancelled can try to sue magazines for not running their articles or ads. It's going to be such an unholy mess.
You can sue your... customers, basically for choosing not to do business with you!?
Even if he wins a one-time payment (no way), how could this do anything but make everyone not want to advertise on Twitter??
I can't wrap my head around the ridiculousness of it. Or grasp why some US political figures are lapping it up.
Imagine McDonald's suing you because you didn't buy enough big macs this quarter. It's crazy. You're not automatically entitled to having customers.
Please drink verification can
You don't understand. Bad publicity is good publicity.
Or maybe, in this particular case... No publicity.
No publicity is good bad publicity like... Well yeah you might have a point there
Elon is the dumbest genius 🤦♂️
This is hilarious.
Should every company, regardless of whether they’ve advertised on Twitter before, be federally mandated to spend a certain percentage of their advertising budget on Musk’s little shitshow?
What, exactly, is the solution he has in mind?
Advertising communism apparently. 🤣
Well it would go well together with the corporate socialism...
More government intervention in markets, because that's what Republicans stand f- oh wait, er....
One of the most poignant comments I've seen on this is it's a ploy to draw attention from his PAC and other negative media
While I think it will have that effect, Musk isn't smart enough to have thought about it that deeply.
Don't underestimate him. He's shown he's a spoiled brat, but he's not shown that he's incapable of elaborate and spiteful plots to get his way.
A smart decision in his eyes might be a dumb one in ours but that doesn't mean he's actually stupid.
Writing him off as an idiot is a one way ticket to being blindsided while you're distracted by something else.
You literally told your advertisers to go fark themselves, Elmo. Several times. This is what consequences look like.
Oh God, it only just occurred to me that that will be used as evidence.
Just because he filed a lawsuit, it doesn't mean it won't immediately be thrown out of court.
No one has any obligation to work with him
I really hope it's tossed out with prejudice
Nah.
Drag it out. Then order him to pay legal fees.
I find this to also be acceptable
ETA: He really is a 13yo in a 53yo body.
You can't sue people for... making normal business decisions? You'd think Musk would understand that if he was a real businessman, LOL RIGHT he's not.
Just like you exercised your free speech to give Trump's PAC a gratuity of $45 million, advertisers exercised their free speech by not spending it on twitter.
Aren't you a free speech absolutist? Why are you trying to force advertisers to exercise their free speech on your platform?
Because he's only a free speech absolutist for himself and for people who agree with him
Yeah, he doesn't care about free speech. He just wants to be able to say whatever he wants without consequences because he knows he's an asswipe
I hope exhibit A of the defences evidence is Elon telling them all to go fuck themselves.
A House Republican lead committee said that the boycott is illegal but also said they don't know if there's really a law against it.
Republicans: Corporations should have freedom of expression (Citizens United)!
Also Republicans: Corporations shouldn't be able to choose what platforms to run ads on!
I can sue X for not advertising on the my Instagram page then? Lol.
Who does he think he is, Israel?
Takes one apartheid asshole to recognize another eh? Lol
Elon Musk: Your honor these mean jerks won’t pay to advertise in my nazi bar and it hurts my feels.
Musk being shocked they don't like his Apartheid Ad Network.
My head-cannon from the lawyers going something like this.
"Thank you Mr. Musk for the lawsuit, we had a lot of fun reading it. Especially the parts you drew (I liked the blue dinosauar). Before we begin, we would like to let you know the legal fees for this case are coming directly from the portion of the advertising budget we allocated to the website formerly known as Twitter"
Probably more entertaining than the actual cases.
I had to skim quite a few down the search results to find an article that described what it meant by suing for "illegal boycott" in more detail.
https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/elon-musk-x-sues-advertisers-garm-boycott-1236097110/
X’s lawsuit alleged that the advertisers’ “boycott” violated Section 1 the U.S.’s Sherman Act antitrust law, which broadly prohibits agreements among distinct actors that unreasonably restrain trade, “by withholding purchases of digital advertising from Twitter.”
“The conduct of Defendants and their co-conspirators alleged herein is per se illegal, or, in the alternative, illegal under the Rule of Reason or ‘quick look’ analytical framework,” the X lawsuit said. “There are no procompetitive effects of the group boycott, which was not reasonably related to, or reasonably necessary for, any procompetitive objectives of the GARM Brand Safety Standards.”
The “unlawful conduct” alleged by X is the subject of “an active investigation” by the House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary, the lawsuit said. The committee’s interim report issued on July 10 concluded that, “The extent to which GARM has organized its trade association and coordinates actions that rob consumers of choices is likely illegal under the antitrust laws and threatens fundamental American freedoms. The information uncovered to date of WFA and GARM’s collusive conduct to demonetize disfavored content is alarming.”
He's trying to claim that companies colluded to stop advertising on X and that violates antitrust laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_boycott
But it's strange because this refusal to advertise on twitter doesn't really harm competition in anyway. Concerted refusal to deal is supposed to be like when 3 big bad companies want to hurt a smaller competitive company so they get together and boycott any suppliers that deal with this competitor or force them to get a worse deal.
The companies GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) represents are big enough (90% of advertising $) but they aren't really competitors to twitter. If say facebook and tiktok got together and told GARM they wouldn't run any of their ads unless they stopped working with twitter that would be much more in the spirit of the law.
But Twitter might still have a tiny bit of a case if they can prove they met GARM's standards but were still excluded anyway. I doubt that's enough for any major payouts though unless the judge is crazy. And honestly I think it's still dumb because even if GARM settles it just tells advertisers "Okay you can advertise on twitter if you want they meet our standards"...but are advertisers really going to want to advertise on the site that just sued them?
Also I don't even think GARM prohibits members from advertising with companies it doesn't recommend and just offers suggestions, which makes this case even more insane if that's true. In that situation it's like the health inspector gives a restaurant a "D" and the restaurant sues customers for not eating there anymore.
he's gonna sue twitter users for using adblockers on the site isn't he?
Wait. What?
Conservatives are hypocrites and morons.
But, hey, if he wants to argue that money isn't expression and corporations don't have freedom of speech I won't try to stop him accidentally overturning Citizens United.
Even if he wins, that still wouldn't even work, the fucking lemon, you can't force people to buy your products.
what a pathetic weird dumbass
Elon: Moooom, make the advertisers pay me
Mom: Well maybe quit being a little shit and being a whiny little spoiled bastard, hmmm?
