GB News is reportedly keeping its eyes peeled on Elon Musk’s decision to sue brands who have boycotted the platform X in the wake of an antisemitism scandal.

A GB News spokesperson told The Telegraph newspaper that it is “closely monitoring” the progress of lawsuits by X and one of YouTube’s rivals Rumbles against advertisers.

The news site launched a paywall earlier this year as it attempted to deal with huge losses, partly due to what the platform called “a massive advertiser boycott”.

Last month, GB News’ Michelle Dewberry criticised the boycotting advertisers.

“Politically minded pressure groups have made it their lives work to try and close us down,” she said as part of a four-minute long tirade.

“The very people who claim to be against hate spend so much of their time whipping up hatred against us.”

The news site received criticism from the regulator Ofcom after it broke rules about politicians fronting news coverage (the channel had programmes hosted by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Esther McVey and Philip Davies) – in a move which another GB News host Nigel Farage heavily criticised at the time.

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Fresh confirmation from GB News that it is closely monitoring X’s lawsuit comes as the cross-industry group Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) has been forced to disband due to the impact of the legal action against its members including Mars and Unilever.

We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war https://t.co/elgT62uDtF

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2024

Musk and X: Timeline of a turbulent affair

• February 2023: A few months after buying the platform, then Twitter, in October 2022, Musk was already under scrutiny for featuring too many irrelevant and annoying advertisements. He apologised.
  

  Sorry for showing you so many irrelevant & annoying ads on Twitter!

  We’re taking the (obvious) corrective action of tying ads to keywords & topics in tweets, like Google does with search.

  This will improve contextual relevance dramatically.

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2023

• November 2023:   
  • After a loss in advertising revenue X CEO Linda Yaccarino travelled to London to woo top advertising dogs.
  • A swathe of brands including IBM, Disney, Apple, and even the British government, pulled advertising from the platform after Musk was embroiled in an antisemitism scandal.
  • Musk told advertisers to “go f*ck themselves” over their decision to pull out.
• June 2024: Musk spoke at Cannes Lions, taking to the stage with WPP’s Mark Read, and told advertisers that his previous remark was about freedom of speech over being “censored for money”.
• August 2024: 
  • Musk is forced to shut San Francisco headquarters due to “processing payments”, and shares plans to relocate both X and Space X to Texas.
  • X takes legal action over advertisers boycotting the platform calling the behaviour, with CEO Linda Yaccarino sharing an open letter calling the behaviour a “stain on a great industry”.