Technology

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?

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??

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?

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

You literally told your advertisers to go fark themselves, Elmo. Several times. This is what consequences look like.

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?

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!

Who does he think he is, Israel?

Elon Musk: Your honor these mean jerks won’t pay to advertise in my nazi bar and it hurts my feels.

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?

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?