Allum Bokhari, managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, told Newsmax on Friday that the Global Alliance for Responsible Media is one of the leading architects censoring online platforms and nonestablishment media.
GARM is a project of the World Federation of Advertisers, which accounts for roughly 90% of all ad spending worldwide. Bokhari's group issued a report Thursday saying four of the world's six leading advertising agencies that are members of GARM have received billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars.
The question posed to Bokhari on "The Chris Salcedo Show" was, How can GARM be curtailed?
"That's a good question," he said. "The internet is built on advertising revenue, which really makes this what I see as a radicalization of the advertising industry, a major problem for free speech.
"And we've seen again and again over the past half-decade or more, whenever there's a political partisan advocacy group that wants some sort of viewpoint censored on social media, they'll always go straight to the advertisers of the social media companies and the media companies, because they know that's how they can twist the screws on online platforms to get them to do what they want because they're so dependent on that ad revenue."
It's possible something can be done legislatively, Bokhari said. He said the House Judiciary Committee issued a recent report showing how GARM has punished online sites or platforms, including X, Spotify, and nonestablishment media, which deviated from speech deemed unsafe for ad brands."
"They're looking at this as a problem of collusion because this organization, the World Federation of Advertisers, represents 90% of the global advertising spent," Bokhari said. "That's almost the entire industry.
"So the way the Judiciary Committee is looking at it is that this is a problem of collusion. It's a problem of anti-competitiveness, because when you have the entire industry working together like that and agreeing collectively to pull away from a platform like X because it provides too much free speech or because they see it as a risk to brand safety, what that means is no member of the cartel can break ranks."
He continued: "If a member of the cartel breaks ranks and says, Hey, I'm going to get a great deal on [X] advertising because everyone else is boycotting it,' then the whole system wouldn't work. So they have to collude as one industry."
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Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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