So you're saying we should take away some freedoms from the businesses by mandating that they continue business with a person they don't share values with or could harm their financial bottom lines due to placing their advertisements alongside content they don't support?
I'll make sure to tell the Colorado wedding cake bakers you said hi.
The freedom of speech or association is really safe in the hands of the conservative movement. /s They pretend to support it until it hurts their feelings. Elon is a POS. He did this to himself.
Also, their argument is complete horse
![crap :crap: :crap:](https://www.allsmileys.com/files/sweetim-texticons/7061.gif)
....
The conduct of Defendants and their co-conspirators is a naked restraint of tradewithout countervailing benefits to competition or consumers. In a competitive market, each socialmedia platform would set the brand safety standards that are optimal for that platform and for itsusers, and advertisers would unilaterally select the platforms on which they advertise. Socialmedia platforms that select efficient brand safety standards will thrive; platforms that selectinefficient standards will lag behind. Through this competitive process, platforms will discoverand adopt the brand safety practices that best promote consumer welfare. But collective actionamong competing advertisers to dictate brand safety standards to be applied by social mediaplatforms shortcuts the competitive process and allows the collective views of a group ofadvertisers with market power to override the interests of consumers. The Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C.§ 1, does not allow this. The brand safety standards set by GARM should succeed or fail in themarketplace on their own merits and not through the coercive exercise of market power byadvertisers acting collectively to promote their own economic interests through commercial restraints at the expense of social media platforms and their users.
It is essentially arguing that industry cooperatives should not be able to decide collectively that they don't want to advertise on a platform until such platform adopts standards such as not showing their ads next to questionable moral content like Swastikas, Hateful Rhetoric, etc.... which is exactly what Elon has turned Twitter into. Enforcing this viewpoint is not a reasonable market outcome and wasn't the intent of the Sherman Antitrust Act. If anything this entity's efforts to moderate discourse that its members' advertisements would be displayed next to would encourage a more fair and balanced marketplace where certain advertisers weren't disadvantaged against competitors because of their association with what has become a poorly moderated platform, and because the changing user base of that platform may not fit the audience that their members ads are targeted at anymore.
Moreover, the industry group was not colluding to get better prices for ads or to have better ad placement for its members. It was not trying to kill reasonably moderated advertising on X. What it was trying to do was express the dissatisfaction of its members' to the strategic direction of the media platform so that the appropriate modifications could be made for those placing ads could feel comfortable doing so without risk of financial consequences to their brands or businesses. They wanted this so they could resume competing in a fair and reasonable marketplace rather than one suddenly tilted to their disadvantage by Musk's controversial opinions, questionable business decisions, and general antics.