Elon Musk’s X/Twitter is suing a number of big businesses and advertisers, claiming that they have agreed to “boycott” the site illegally.
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It has filed a lawsuit in a Texas court against the food behemoths Mars and Unilever, the for-profit healthcare provider CVS Health, and the renewable energy business Orsted, in addition to a trade group known as the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).
X asserts that they have cost it “billions of dollars” in income.
The complaint is unlikely to succeed, according to legal experts, because it will be difficult to prove any company coordination or agreement.
The case concerns the collapse in advertising revenue that occurred in 2022, shortly after Mr. Musk purchased X, which was then known as Twitter.
Because of worries that the platform’s new owner was not taking online material removal seriously enough, some businesses had been hesitant to place advertisements on it.
The year following Mr. Musk’s acquisition of the former Twitter, advertising revenue fell by over 50%.
X chief executive Linda Yaccarino said: “People are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is constricted. No small group of people should monopolise what gets monetised.”
She said the alleged “boycott” threatened the company’s “ability to thrive in the future”.
Mr Musk tweeted: “We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words. Now, it is war.”
The WFA and the accused companies have not responded to requests for comment.
Legal experts have suggested the case is unlikely to succeed.
“As a general rule, a politically motivated boycott is not an antitrust violation. It is protected speech under our First Amendment,” said Bill Baer, who was assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s antitrust division under former US president Barack Obama.
Christine Bartholomew, an antitrust expert and professor at University at Buffalo’s law school said X needed to show there was an “actual agreement to boycott joined by each advertiser”, which she said would be “no small hurdle” to prove.
Even if the case succeeds, the social media site cannot force companies to buy advertising space on the platform.
X is seeking unspecified damages and a court order against any continued efforts to conspire to withhold advertising spending.