US government awards billions in contracts to censorship cartel
The federal government has awarded billions of dollars in contracts to corporations that are part of a powerful censorship cartel, a report said Thursday.
The Gold Report reported last month how the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which includes global corporations like IBM, Mastercard, PepsiCo, AB InBev, Nestlé, and L'Oréal, forces media and other corporations to embrace woke narratives and ideologies.
The WFA buys approximately 90% of the world’s advertising, which translates to nearly $1 trillion in ad spending annually. In 2019, the WFA created the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) to address “harmful content” and “misinformation.” GARM’s steering committee includes Proctor & Gamble, Mars, Unilever, Diageo, and three trade associations. This steering committee also acts as GARM’s board of directors.
The year it was created, GARM became a flagship partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) to “leverage” the WEF’s “existing network.”
GARM states that its objective is to “safeguard the potential of digital media by reducing the availability and monetization of harmful content online.” In other words, the coalition decides what content is put online by withholding advertising dollars. GARM also says it works with “platforms to do more to address harmful and misleading media environments.”
Virtually every major ad agency is owned by one of six advertising giants, sometimes referred to as “The Big Six.” Four of them belong to GARM and have been awarded hefty government contracts, according to a report by the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO).
Publicis Groupe
French global ad agency Publicis Groupe has several subsidiaries in the United States. It was instrumental in creating NewsGuard, a federally funded organization which polices the internet for “misinformation.” NewsGuard has recently come under congressional investigation for its rating system which generally scores conservative news sites as “unreliable” while ranking Leftist news sites “trustworthy.”
Once it declares which sites are trustworthy and which are unreliable, NewsGuard sells the lists to advertisers so they can steer clear of the poorly rated websites.
NewsGuard works closely with the Global Engagement Center (GEC), an office within the State Department whose stated mission is to “counter foreign disinformation.” It has been described by FFO founder Mike Benz, a former State Department official, as “the first government censorship operation within the federal government.” House Republicans have referred to the GEC as “subsidized censorship of free speech and disfavored opinions.”
Publicis Groupe, whose clients include pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer, Sanofi, and AstraZeneca, partnered with NewsGuard in 2021 to form HealthGuard, a browser plugin which warned internet users about websites containing “vaccine misinformation.”
Executives within Publicis Groupe have openly called on social media companies to censor what they label “racist” speech.
Publicis Groupe board member Thomas Glocer is the former CEO of Reuters and belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations, described as a “deep state-linked” organization involving members of the intelligence community.
Publicis Groupe received a $394.2 million contract from the Department of Human Health and Services (HHS) for its anti-tobacco campaign, due to end next year. OnPoint Consulting and Sapient Government Solutions, subsidiaries of Publicis Groupe, have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the US government in past years.
Interpublic Group (IPG)
IPG was one of the companies that led the advertising boycott against Twitter after it was acquired by Elon Musk, who was uncooperative with GARM’s censorship dictates.
For years, IPG has been promoting an idea it calls “brand responsibility,” which requires an ad agency to not only “protect” its brands but also “the communities that a brand serves, weighing the societal impact of the content, the publishers and services, and the platforms being funded by advertising.”
This approach demands that brands subscribe to diversity ideology and censor hate speech and “misinformation.”
IPG struck its own deal with NewsGuard in 2021 to blacklist television content.
HHS awarded IPG subsidiary DXTRA Inc. with over $1.1 billion in contracts. MullenLowe Global, another IPG subsidiary, has a $454 million contract to run the Pentagon’s Joint Advertising, Market Research & Studies program (JAMRS).
Omnicom
In 2020, Omnicom created the Council on Accountable Social Advertising to persuade social media platforms to censor “inappropriate” content, racism, and “conspiracy theories.” The ad agency, which has its own ties to NewsGuard, has openly demanded censorship of “climate misinformation.”
The US Army awarded Omnicom subsidiary DDB Chicago Inc. a $4 billion contract to run its marketing account for 10 years. Ketchum, another Omnicom subsidiary, holds a $247 million contract with HHS. The US Air Force has awarded a $741 million contract to GSD&M Idea City LLC, a third Omnicom subsidiary, for recruitment advertising.
WPP
WPP is a British advertising firm that has been advocating for censorship as far back as 2017. The multinational corporation has pressured social media companies to suppress disfavored content and urged its clients to avoid advertising on platforms guilty of “hate speech.”
In a nod to NewsGuard, WPP launched an AI-powered ranking program to judge the suitability of websites for ad placements.
GroupM, a major ad agency and subsidiary of WPP, serves on GARM’s steering committee. GroupM CEO Christian Juhl has pushed brands to blacklist media that do not toe the line on climate change and diversity, and defended the GARM cartel to Congress.
The US Navy has awarded WPP subsidiary VMLY&R more than $455 million for a five-year contract. Wunderman Thompson, another WPP subsidiary, has been producing recruitment ads for the US Marines for over 70 years.
The Joe Rogan incident
In 2022, GARM threatened Spotify with an advertising boycott after podcast host Joe Rogan said that young, healthy people need not take the COVID-19 vaccine. According to internal communications, GARM co-founder and leader Rob Rakowitz knew that ordering a boycott of Spotify could get GARM “into hot water by way of anticompetitive and collusive behaviors.”
Rakowitz, an avowed globalist, has previously complained about the US Constitution, which he said is a “literal law from 230 years ago (made by white men exclusively).” Mostly, he has been concerned with the constitutional right to freedom of speech. In an email to WFA CEO Stephan Loerke, Rakowitz expressed consternation that “[p]eople are advocating for freedom of speech online” with anonymity.
“Mr. Rakowitz’s power comes from the members of GARM and their advertising dollars,” explained the House Judiciary Committee’s report. “Because power lies with the members, when members communicate an opinion to Mr. Rakowitz, he is likely to communicate that opinion on to the platforms. Ultimately, when platforms receive the message from Mr. Rakowitz, the companies have the choice to cede to his demands or risk losing their advertising revenue.”
Coca-Cola was especially concerned about Rogan’s take on the COVID-19 shots, telling Rakowitz that this “particular issue (misinformation) does not exactly fit cleanly into [Coca-Cola’s] policy.”
‘Taking on Elon Musk’
GARM also boasted in 2022 about “taking on Elon Musk” shortly after he purchased Twitter (now X), which was a member of GARM at the time. One GARM corporation asked to “arrange a meeting and hear more about [GARM’s] perspectives about the Twitter situation and a possible boycott from many companies.” After holding extensive briefings on Musk, GARM launched a boycott of X and tanked the social media company’s advertising revenue by 80%.
Even as they celebrated the hit to X’s revenue, WFA and GARM members discussed more strategies to destroy the social media platform that came under Elon Musk'sc control. One strategy was to send Musk a list of demands regarding what content should or should not be allowed on the platform. If all demands were not met by a specific deadline, GARM would expel Twitter from the cartel and attack it in the media.
Another GARM member expressed concern over Musk’s release of The Twitter Files, which exposed a joint censorship operation run by the former Twitter administration and the White House.
Internal documents also show that GARM pressured Facebook to label a Trump campaign advertisement as “misinformation.”
Blocking conservative news outlets
The cartel further discussed strategies on how to block Right-leaning news outlets like Fox News, Breitbart, and The Daily Wire. A member of GARM’s steering committee wrote that he “hated their ideology and bulls**t.” However, he admitted that his corporation “couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion[s]” so instead “watched them very carefully and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line.”
To back up their claims about conservative sites spewing misinformation, GARM works with NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), two organizations that claim to be “neutral” and “nonpartisan” news rating sites. NewsGuard and GDI consistently rate conservative news outlets as “disinformation” while rating Leftist sites, and even false claims, as trustworthy.
GARM also launched a campaign against Fox News for its coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse, a young man who shot and killed two rioters in self-defense in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A jury acquitted Rittenhouse of all charges. But when Fox News said Rittenhouse was not guilty of murder, the WFA was infuriated.
“From a brand-owner perspective, the reasoning which has led us to put pressure and hold to account platforms on hate speech and harmful content should also apply to a media owner,” wrote Loerke. “We’ve always made it clear that the standards which we (GARM) want to see platforms enforce should be valid irrespective of media (even if [the media] has widespread popular support).”
Bad reviews also labeled ‘misinformation’
GARM worked with the European Union to develop a definition for misinformation. Both entities now define the word as “the presence of verifiably false or willfully misleading content that is directly connected to user or societal harm...”
However, GARM does not only seek to censor political “misinformation.” Unilever, for instance, complained to TikTok that a user had called one of its shampoos “straight dish soap,” which the corporation felt qualified as misinformation.
The House Judiciary Committee says it will continue to investigate GARM and its members, whose conduct “likely violates antitrust laws.”
