Fool Me Thrice: ExTwitter’s Empty Brand Safety Promises

The famous line is “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” But what do you call it when Elon Musk fools advertisers over and over again into believing that ExTwitter will protect their brand safety, despite making it clear that he has no interest in doing so?

At this point, no advertiser can seriously believe that Elon Musk’s ExTwitter will protect the brand safety of its advertisers. I mean, this is literally the guy who told advertisers to “go fuck themselves” after some pulled their advertisements following one of Elon’s many ridiculous comments (as well as evidence of ads appearing next to neo-Nazi content).

But, at the recent Cannes Lion advertising festival, Elon and Linda Yaccarino tried to play nice with advertisers. They announced that ExTwitter was rejoining the World Federation of Advertisers’ (WFA) Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).

After drifting from the World Federation of Advertisers’ (WFA) Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) when Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social platform now known as X has decided to rejoin the coalition of online providers and brand partners, working to uphold the group’s brand-safety requirements and potentially win back advertisers.

“We’re excited to announce that X has reinstated our relationship with the @wfamarketers Global Alliance for Responsible Media,” the social media company posted on its platform Monday, adding that “X is committed to the safety of our global town square and proud to be part of the GARM community.”

The problem with this announcement, though, is that basically every time ExTwitter is desperate for advertisers to buy some ads, it touts GARM compliance, but then Elon goes on some antisemitic rant, or yet another study comes out showing what a terrible job ExTwitter does in protecting brand safety, and the promises of GARM compliance are forgotten.

Why is this time any different?

Some history: soon after Elon completed the purchase of Twitter, GARM had issued an open letter to Elon about making sure he was committed to brand safety.

At the time, Elon insisted the company’s “commitment to brand safety” was unchanged. He met with GARM folks, and promised to uphold the guidelines.

A few months later, the company announced a new brand safety effort, compliant with GARM.

But, largely due to Elon’s own nonsense (and misunderstanding of free speech), he keeps going back on those promises and personally driving advertisers away.

And each time the company gets desperate for new advertisers, it tries to claim it’s supportive of the GARM approach to “brand safety” for advertisers.

Indeed, at last year’s Cannes Lion, the company also talked about its GARM compliance. That was just months before Elon told advertisers to go fuck themselves, and multiple reports showed that big brand advertisers were showing up next to some pretty horrific content.

So it’s not even clear what is meant by ExTwitter “rejoining” GARM. The company keeps touting GARM as its standard anyway over the last few years, and then totally failing to live up to those promises, mostly due to their own owner’s behavior and desire to appease the worst people in society.

Any advertiser who thinks this newly constituted relationship with GARM means literally anything for brand safety is too gullible to be left alone with an advertisement. It’s all for show. Sooner or later (probably sooner) Elon will do something horrible and/or another study will come out showing how badly the company protects the brand safety of its advertisers.

It’s happened before. It’ll happen again. And rebuilding a relationship with GARM is just window dressing.