Censorship Industry: GARM Members Receive Billions in Federal Contracts

The federal government is sending billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to four of the big six global advertising agencies, which include some of the leading architects of online censorship.

These multinational corporations have spent much of the last decade demanding online censorship of “hate speech,” “disinformation,” and “harmful content” on social media platforms, all while being paid by U.S. taxpayers, who overwhelmingly support free speech.

Since 2019, the industry has sought to pressure social media companies through the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a project of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), a body that account for roughly 90 percent of all ad spending worldwide.

As demonstrated in a recent report by the House Judiciary Committee, GARM exerted pressure against platforms that host controversial or disfavored speech, using its influence over the internet’s revenue streams to push for stricter censorship standards.

The report revealed a number of incidents of GARM’s relentless drive to punish any site or platform that deviated from “brand safe” speech:

• The Twitter/X boycott: after a collective boycott of X due to Elon Musk’s relaxation content moderation regime, GARM members bragged “taking on Elon Musk” and taking X “80 percent below revenue forecasts.”
• Threatening Spotify: members of GARM’s steer team placed sustained pressure on Spotify over its support for Joe Rogan, then the world’s number-one podcast host, for hosting guests skeptical of official COVID-19 policies. Members of GARM’s steer team also advised Coca-cola, a major global brand, that Rogan and Spotify were a “major area of concern.”
• Blacklisting non-establishment media: GARM members “closely watched” disfavored news outlets to find a pretext for withdrawing ad dollars, with Breitbart News and The Daily Wire specifically named. GARM also collaborated with NewsGuard, a private company, and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British nonprofit. The primary purpose of both these organizations is to build blacklists of disfavored news sources.

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