An organization called Media Matters reviewed Twitter content and determined that the ads placed by major corporations were sometimes posted next to Nazi or other anti-Semitic tweets. Some of these corporations responded by suspending their ads, thus hurting Twitter’s revenues. Elon Musk has sued Media Matters.
My view: Musk owns Twitter (X); he can put up any content he wants. Media Matters is free to comment on the content of Twitter and warn reputable advertisers that their ads are being placed next to offensive content. Big advertisers are free to place their ads wherever they want and they are free to object to advertising alongside Nazi tweets. Everyone is free.
Greg Sergeant of The Washington Post reviewed the situation. If you are able to open his article, you will see the Nazi tweets.
He begins:
Elon Musk’s new lawsuit against Media Matters, which X Corp. filed late Monday, has been dismissed by legal experts as a frivolous effort to bully a prominent critic into silence. But some Republicans apparently see this as a feature, not a bug: They are allying themselves with Musk’s effort for precisely this purpose.
Musk’s suit charges that Media Matters deliberately and deceptively harmed X (formerly Twitter) with a widely-publicized investigation showing that posts containing pro-Nazi content appeared on X alongside advertisements from leading companies. That, along with a surge in antisemitic content, has advertisers fleeing the site, sparking a slide in ad revenue.
Republicans are eagerly rushing to Musk’s rescue — and not just rhetorically. Two GOP state attorneys general — Ken Paxton in Texas and Andrew Bailey in Missouri — have responded by announcing vaguely defined investigations into Media Matters.
Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller is urging Republican law enforcement officials to probe Media Matters for “criminal” activity. And Mike Davis, who is touting himself as Donald Trump’s next attorney general, has declared that Media Matters staff members should be jailed.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas, doesn’t deny that the juxtapositions between ads and pro-Nazi postings are real. Rather, it accuses Media Matters of creating an account following only fringe content and endlessly refreshing it until it finally generated the juxtapositions. Those are “extraordinarily rare,” the suit says, but were deliberately engineered to disparage X, harm its revenue stream and interfere with its contracts with advertisers.
It’s a weak case, as experts point out. The Media Matters article said it had “found” the juxtapositions, which X calls “false,” insisting they were “manipulated” into existence. But even if you question Media Matters’s presentation of the facts, it still wouldn’t show that it did “all of this to harm X’s market value,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
“If Media Matters doctored the images and couldn’t replicate those results, then maybe there would be a claim here,” Vladeck told me, stressing that it did prove “possible to see those ads” alongside Nazi-related content. He noted that Media Matters plausibly wrote about these juxtapositions not to hurt X, but because they’re “newsworthy.”
When I asked Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, whether it’s misleading to say these images were “found,” he rejected the premise. He noted that Media Matters’s goal was to show that despite X’s assurances to the contrary, internal safeguards had failed to prevent those juxtapositions from actually happening.
“The point that we’ve been making is that the filters that they say exist are not working the way that they claim,” Carusone said of X. “Ads can and do run alongside extremist content.” That’s something those companies would surely want to know about — and avoid.
The lawsuit might get dismissed. But if not, Carusone said, Media Matters would probably pursue discovery, seeking to learn whether Musk and X executives “knew internally” that these juxtapositions were happening, what they communicated with advertisers about this, and how Musk internally discussed procedures for handling extremist content.
Discovery would also seek communications about Musk’s public antisemitism, Carusone said. Musk recently endorsed a posting that some Jewish communities are pushing “hatred against whites,” resulting in “hordes of minorities flooding” into Western countries — classic white genocide theory. Carusone noted that discovery could establish whether Musk’s “seeming endorsement of the white genocide worldview” was a major reason for “advertisers to reassess.”
Which brings us to a bigger point: Musk’s own antisemitic utterances — and his own website’s handling of antisemitic content — are plainly also key reasons companies are leaving. As First Amendment lawyer Ken White told me, it’s hard to imagine that the Media Matters report alone would have done this damage: “Much of the advertiser exodus resulted from Musk personally and eagerly endorsing explicitly antisemitic rhetoric.”
Media Matters is the creation of David Brock, whose “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative” chronicles his past right-wing life and how he came to see the rot of the modern conservative movement. One can like Media Matters or hate it, but they aren’t a hit squad, and they do their research.
Musk is in an elongated passage through the FO portion of FAFO. He resents any pushback on his racism and antisemitism. He believes in “Free speech (and bigotry and hatred) for me, but not for thee”.
May he suffer greatly.
His finding out is so well deserved
It’s an interesting story.
One slight emendation:
Stephen Miller, known for instituting mass kidnapping of the children of asylum seekers (why is he not in prison for this?), is urging Republican law enforcement officials to probe Media Matters for “criminal” activity.
Isn’t kidnapping a crime? So, WTF? If you do a LOT of kidnapping, it becomes OK? Please explain this to me.
Elon Musk has the personality of a two year old. “Mine! Mine! Mine!”
Musk has retweeted Pizzagate conspiracy theory stuff five times recently. Has he gone totally over the edge?
Musk has been over the edge for a long time, from what I’ve been reading over the years since Madman Musk’s government subsided wealth throned him as a regular headline magnet.
Shame on Netanyahu for escorting anti-Semite Elon Musk around the devastated burned-out kibbutzim. Shame on him too for his failure to protect the people who lived near Gaza. Latest poll in Israel shows his support is 27%. Bring on the elections. Shame on him for failing to pursue peace and a two-state solution.
Agreed
Second the agreement.