Mastercard, once a major member and promoter of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), is now taking steps to “distance itself” from that chapter in its corporate history.
Going forward, Mastercard will not make marketing or branding decisions based on third parties, ADF reports, citing emails.
Instead, Mastercard commits to independent decision-making regarding advertising, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) announced. This non-profit campaigned for the outcome and continues to put pressure on other huge corporations, once members of GARM, to do the same.
ADF was representing Inspire Investing, who worked with a shareholder, to file a shareholder resolution that would have launched an investigation into Mastercard’s GARM ties. To avoid this, the financial giant adopted “a new commitment to independent decision-making in advertising that will be reflected on its investor relations webpage by July 2025.”
ADF Senior Counsel and Senior Vice President for Corporate Engagement Jeremy Tedesco commented that corporations should not be involved in censorship efforts at any level and that Mastercard is now “doing the right thing by engaging its shareholders and taking steps to distance itself from GARM.”
While Mastercard can continue to make ill-advised decisions on its own, the potential harm is orders of magnitude greater when “disfavored” creators’ and platforms’ ad revenue is attacked by one unified front (“third-party”), that gathers much of the world’s advertising power.
GARM – dubbed by critics as a pro-censorship ad cartel – was established in 2019 by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), whose president at the time was Mastercard’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Raja Rajamannar.
In June 2020, at the height of the US presidential campaign, Rajamannar urged “every CMP and social platform to join GARM,” and, in effect, explained how things (and influence) work.
“The entire digital ecosystem is kept afloat by the money we, the brand owners, spend on ads. We need to put our mouth where our money is and drive this change across the industry,” he said at the time.
GARM ended up representing 90% of the massively powerful global advertising industry – and turning that power into a boycott and deplatforming tool targeting conservative media, entire platforms – namely, X, Joe Rogan, and many others.
The group’s role, however, failed to fly under the radar of the US House Judiciary Committee, which last July published a report titled, “GARM’s Harm: How the World’s Biggest Brands Seek to Control Online Speech.”
Only a month later, GARM folded its tent, with WFA still maintaining that the sole purpose of this “small, not-for-profit initiative” was to “help advertisers avoid inadvertently supporting harmful and illegal content.”
