How We’re Confronting the Biggest Corporate Bias Scandal of the Year
Hundreds of companies colluded to censor conservative media. We’re taking the fight to them on your behalf.
Instances of explicit corporate bias are, quite frankly, often difficult to find. Whether it’s exposing sneaky anti-Israel proposals at Lockheed Martin and Amazon before and after October 7 or shining light on the shortcomings of Apple’s anti-sex abuse protections for minors, the job often involves parsing through complex language, obscure data, and hundreds of shareholder proposals to engage companies effectively on your behalf.
And then sometimes corporate bias just announces itself. Allow me to introduce you to GARM: by all counts, the most shocking example of anti-conservative bias in the corporate space this year.
What Is GARM — And Why It Matters
What is GARM? The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) was an initiative involving America’s biggest brands, formed in 2019 by the World Federation of Advertisers, a group controlling around 90% of money going into global advertising. GARM was billed as protecting companies from advertising next to “harmful” content, a broad label encompassing everything from legitimately violent online content to the definitely-not-vague category of ‘hate speech.’
Off of that background, you can probably guess what went wrong. The House Judiciary Committee released a damning report on GARM in July of this year, asserting that GARM’s standards led the companies involved to “demonetize platforms, podcasts, news outlets, and other content deemed disfavored by GARM and its members.” As per the report (check out the full text here), GARM’s “collusion can have the effect of eliminating a variety of content and viewpoints available to consumers.”
Based on that summary, you can probably guess which viewpoints and content were targeted for censorship under GARM’s auspices. The Alliance targeted actors including:
Spotify, for platforming Joe Rogan
Twitter/X, over Elon Musk’s walkback of many of the app’s censorship policies
Mainstream conservative news outlets like the Daily Wire and Fox News.
In the House hearing on GARM, Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro blasted the Alliance as a shining example of corporate America’s progressive dominance. See below:
This was partisan corporate politics at its finest - and short-lived, to boot. After X owner Elon Musk launched a lawsuit against GARM over loss of revenue, the Alliance shut its doors in a matter of days. It was the closing gambit of a fight that, sans involvement of powerful right-sympathetic forces like Musk, could have gone a lot worse for center-right media consumers.
How We’re Responding on Your Behalf
We’re proud to be partnering with many of our clients to bring GARM transparency proposals to the ballots of companies including Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, and Disney. Incredible credit is due to our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom for drafting these transparency proposals, along with the incredible crew at 1792 Exchange for not only tracking GARM’s membership but sharing that data with us as we look to pick targets for GARM accountability.
In an increasingly divided political climate, particularly against the backdrop of an election year, it’s not only irresponsible but immoral for companies to use shareholder money (read: your money) to extend their partisan slants into their advertising practices. As I wrote at The American Mind on the GARM situation:
“Many of America’s biggest businesses signed onto GARM’s objectives. Shareholders should leverage corporate influence and the shareholder proposal process to get transparency from these companies about the Alliance’s membership, dues, and imposed content standards… The minds behind GARM are banking on the conservatives they worked to censor forgetting about the corporate bias that GARM promoted.”
You, the shareholder, the customer, and the true owner of these companies — can’t afford to forget. This proxy season, we’re demanding answers about GARM from some of the alliance’s biggest members. We couldn’t fight for transparency, or ensure accountability for blatant anti-conservative bias, without your influence as shareholders. Thank you for allowing us to represent you in this endeavor.
Isaac Willour is a corporate relations analyst at Bowyer Research.