Imagine that a congressional investigation uncovered evidence that America’s entire advertising infrastructure was engaged in targeted censorship of minority business owners. The organization in charge of this censorship represented 90% of the money spent on global advertising, including every major ad buying company and the biggest media buying agency in the world.

Organizations with white owners received normal advertising services while those owned by minorities were monitored to ensure they didn’t “stoop below” the threshold of what was deemed socially acceptable. Major players in the ad collusion campaign were caught lamenting that minority-owned businesses weren’t stepping outside of so-called acceptable limits to make themselves targets: “as much as we hate…their ideology and bullsh*t, we couldn’t really justify blocking them.” When this behavior was made public, organizers denied everything, even in the face of legal risk.

What would happen in that situation? Would we be content with letting this sort of behavior go unpunished? Of course not. Outside of the legal issues at play, there would be immediate and deserved backlash for any agency that would perpetuate a scandal of this size and nature.

What I’ve just described has happened, but not along racial lines. America’s biggest ad companies have been hard at work silencing media outlets based on a far more important classification than race: political ideology. It’s called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM)—and it’s one of the biggest corporate bias stories of the year.

GARM was a coalition of corporations and ad agencies formed in the wake of the 2019 New Zealand mosque shooting. It was designed, in its own words, to counter “a slew of high-profile cases where brands’ ads appeared next to illegal or harmful content, such as promoting terrorism or child pornography…creating both consumer and reputational issues for brands.”

What was a fresh, new endeavor in combatting online extremism and protecting brand safety, however, soured incredibly quickly. GARM’s mission mutated into a broader attempt to police “harmful content,” guided by the supposed unbiased, nonpartisan minds at the Alliance’s helm.

The quotes in the first paragraph of this article are all directly taken from email exchanges between GARM leadership—except they’re actually about right-of-center news outlets that GARM intended to quash. GARM leader Ron Rakowitz, a perfect example of big business’s barely concealed partisanship, bemoaned (1) the audacity of people “advocating for freedom of speech online,” (2) the audacity of Facebook to refuse to censor Trump ads on behalf of GARM’s corporate partners, a refusal Rakowitz described as “reprehensible,” and (3) the audacity of having a Constitution written solely by white men.

The House Judiciary Committee released a damning report on GARM in July, highlighting the above exchanges and a plethora of other evidence. The report concludes that the Alliance not only “demonetiz[ed] certain viewpoints to limit consumer choice” but also “likely violated federal antitrust laws.” A month later, Elon Musk launched a lawsuit against GARM alleging that they colluded to deprive X of billions in ad revenue. Days later, GARM shut down for good—but the damage had been done.

Many of America’s biggest businesses signed onto GARM’s objectives. While many likely did so in a bid to legitimately increase their brand safety, they ended up being part of a politically-biased censorship machine. As someone who works in corporate engagement and sees how biased major companies are, some of the companies that joined have a track record on political bias that needs to be investigated (the full list can be viewed courtesy of the good folks at the 1792 Exchange here).

Here’s three examples from our work in corporate engagement:

Amazon. Did Amazon’s sympathy toward GARM’s advertising philosophy lead them to censor books critiquing the transgender movement like Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally? Does moderating “harmful content” also mean enforcing the desires of LGBTQ activists to censor alternative viewpoints?

Bank of America. Does Bank of America view its desire to police “harmful content” in keeping with its decision to debank Christian humanitarian nonprofits like Indigenous Advance Ministries? If the answer is yes, we need to look into why the Alliance worked with companies that are happy to jeopardize financial aid going to orphans in Uganda. If the answer is at odds with BofA’s policies, then it’s a perfect time for them to clarify their vague and overbroad approach to debanking.

Microsoft. The company staked out a bold stance on combating political extremism, including its subsidiaries which are more than happy to censor presidential candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy over vague claims of “hate speech” and “violence.” As I’ve previously written at TAM, however, Microsoft’s boldness doesn’t extend to board members who joke about assassinating Donald Trump. It’s one of the biggest companies on earth—and one with so many examples of political bias that its membership in GARM raises innumerable red flags.

It’s time for us to get answers from GARM’s members. 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. For those concerned about corporations colluding against conservatives, it’s time to pay more attention to corporate bias. The excellent work of journalists like Robby Starbuck has been instrumental in uncovering this growing issue.

The pro-ESG movement has succeeded because conservatives either don’t pay attention to these developments or write off our ability to change the status quo in the name of corporate freedom. The minds behind GARM are banking on the conservatives they worked to censor forgetting about the corporate bias that GARM promoted. It’s on us to understand the reality of bias in the corporate space and ramp up the pressure until we get the answers that America’s shareholders—and consumers—deserve.