After a devastating advertiser exodus last week involving some of the world’s largest media companies, X owner Elon Musk is suing the progressive watchdog group Media Matters over its analysis highlighting antisemitic and pro-Nazi content on X — a report that appeared to play a significant role in the massive and highly damaging brand revolt.
The lawsuit filed Monday accuses Media Matters of distorting how likely it is for ads to appear beside extremist content on X, alleging that the group’s testing methodology was not representative of how real users experience the site.
“Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers’ posts on X Corp.’s social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform,” the complaint filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas said. “Media Matters designed both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”
Ooooh. Discovery is gonna be goooooooood.
starts popping popcorn
The threat of discovery was what forced him to have to buy twitter in the first place.
Fool me once…
Discovery giveth
Discovery taketh away
I got mine 🍿
So looks like they did some judge shopping first. They’re suing a company located in DC in a Texas court with a Trump-appointed judge: https://x.com/esqueer_/status/1726762933969895771?s=46&t=EUtgwMByNj4sQbVP9INV-Q
When your “thermonuclear lawsuit” is so flimsy that you have to find a bully-friendly court first…
The whole point of conservatives stacking the courts for decades has been to reach a point when they could win with the most flimsy, immoral, and unethical of reasoning (e.g. conservative logic).
East TX courts are the go to for Republicans and companies. They are notorious for handing favorable verdicts to them. Especially on things like this.
Ugh. That’s bullshit. I still hope Elon / Twitter lose. Fuck that guy.
“free-speech absolutist”
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You think Apple & Disney didn’t verify this for themselves before ditching Twitter?
This dumb-ass is going to be proven to be a bigot in a US court of law, isn’t he?
“Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers’ posts on X Corp.’s social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform,” the complaint filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas said. “Media Matters designed both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”
The counter-suit for this claim is going to be 🧑🍳💋
Damn if only there was a way for bud to prevent ads from appearing next to Nazis on his platform 😆
You think Apple & Disney didn’t verify this for themselves before ditching Twitter?
They might have. It would be great if they file a brief with the court to support the argument. I’m pretty sure that Musk is absolutely going to tear through Media Matter’s search history and say some bullshit like “Yeah, if you search for Nazi 10,000 times and Apple 10,000 times, we’re absolutely going to do the thing you asked. But the number of people who actually do that is few and Media Matters made it sound like it was everyone.”
Media Matter’s is going to absolutely need others joining in to provide other sources of information independent of them. That’ll make the almost inevitable argument from Musk that “Nazi + Apple is a rare thing” incredibly weak.
Apple and Disney won’t be filing a brief with the court. Apple and Disney are going to get a subpoena.
Because Musk is arguing that Media Matters was the only user that saw those ads next to racist content. So naturally Apple and Disney will need to be asked, “If only a single user saw your ads next to racist content, would you continue running ads on that platform?”
That’s not a question they want to answer in public. So they are going to be pressuring Musk to drop the lawsuit.
Yeah, if you search for Nazi 10,000 times and Apple 10,000 times, we’re absolutely going to do the thing you asked. But the number of people who actually do that is few and Media Matters made it sound like it was everyone.
Don’t believe your lying eyes said the Malignant Narcissist.
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Ah yes, the ever-popular argument that “the problem isn’t that we’re a Nazi platform, the problem is that people are pointing out that we’re a Nazi platform”.
“Free Speech absolutist”
Translation: Everyone absolutely must listen to what I have to say and I absolutely have the right to make others shut up the fuck up so they can listen to what I have to say. It is what I call freedom!!!
“Yes, I do absolutely love freeze peach” - Elon, probably
In before Elongate Muskrat calls Media Matters a pedophile.
Shouldn’t he be alarmed and thankful? Not suing? Hmm
The call is coming from inside the empty Twitter offices.
X has gotten so bad…any comments section it seems is full of troll farm accounts for Republican fascist ideology. Lately there have been a bunch of memes about how J6 was just a left wing hoax to make Republicans look bad. It’s insane, I watched J6 unfold in disbelief on like 3 live news channels- the fact that they are claiming this is just demonstrably false. Free speech is not protected if it is hate speech, or if it is libelous, and most pertinent - if it is posted on a private company’s forum, so misinformation should be labeled as such or removed. Trump has proven a lack of critical thinking skills is another pandemic in this country and they cannot be allowed to return to power.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
In real time… fucking a! George Orwell was a something else.
I was just thinking about that line but couldn’t remember it. Thanks for posting. It’s insane
Ok, but like, X corp? For real? Musk really leaning into the comic book villain shit he’s got going on lately.
Discount Lex Luthor.
Can Xitter prove they didn’t serve those ads next to that content? If not I don’t see how they can win this.
Actually he released this statement admitting that it did happen, but wants us to think he’s been wronged because someone curated a feed then hit refresh a bunch of times, and only a couple of people saw it, so it doesn’t count.
And by this CNN report it sounds like he’s now misrepresenting their own findings.
Yeah. That statement isn’t doing him any good.
If 50 out of 5.5 billion were odds to win the mega jackpot lottery, sure. The chances seem insignificant and super low.
The problem is, 5.5 billion numbers are being rolled every day and 50 people out of a much smaller selection pool are going to win. So, if X has a total of 2000 advertisers that give a shit about ad placement, someone has a high chance of winning. Multiple times.
The actual odds are based off of the total number of advertisers and are only loosely based on total ad impressions. Here is what I mean: Every tweet, antisemitic or not, will be close to an ad and not all advertisers care where their ads land. If you find a Nazi, you will find an ad.
You can start doing the math about the actual distance a tweet is from an ad and stuff. Whatever.
This is the important bit: 50 out of 5.5 billion was just what Media Matters showcased and absolutely does not show the entire problem. It’s much worse.
I hope MM has a statistics expert to point this out in court.
It’s less about statistics and more about deception in my opinion. Numbers are almost always meaningless in papers that excessively use bold type and underlined words.
The function of the paper wasn’t to prove anything. It was to get idiots focused on its false concept of freedom of speech. Even if my math assumptions are wrong, it doesn’t matter and was never the point of the paper.
Hmmm, understood. Well hopefully they’ll get whatever expert they need to explain that.
Exactly. He’s not saying it didn’t happen but rather it’s not typical.
He’s apparently saying they “manufactured images” in the lawsuit which is a weird way of describing “refreshed until our system natively generated this.”
Could be a messy enough distinction to confuse a judge or jury into thinking they were manufacturing it
Possibly. Hopefully not.
That’s how Tesla won their most recent case with an autopilot failure. They acknowledge that the car did indeed drive itself into a tree. But that the company did not knowingly sell a defective product as they routinely update the vehicle.
That wasn’t the argument that won the day for them, but it was the argument that allowed them to start on a way more technical footing that would allow them to misdirect the court to focus more on any driver impairments.
Musk’s lawyers are insanely good at misdirection, they are some of the best at this one particular thing. Additionally, the case was file in an incredibly friendly court to Musk, so it’s likely the Judge will be willing to go down the rabbit hole of insanely technical arguments while losing sight of the more broad questions.
There is a lot stacked up against Media Matters here.
All good points, except then they were on defense. Now they’re on offense trying to accuse someone else of malicious harm, when all MM did was create a new profile, then follow accounts and refresh. Sure, it was an abnormal amount of times unless you’re a caffeinated doomscroller, but otherwise they didn’t fake or insert anything. So it would seem like MM is on at least as good of defense footing here. Maybe.
Even that is wrong though. Every few posts, Nazi or not, is going to have an ad next to it. The numbers they are talking about are mostly irrelevant.
The statement from exTwitter is not showing total numbers. It’s only referencing against what Media Matters showcased.
“We think free speech is important unless that speech is being mean to us” is the biggest crybaby bullshit in the world.
That’s been his playbook since before buying Twitter.
alleging that the group’s testing methodology was not representative of how real users experience the site.
Now all he has to proof is that somehow Media Matters has a vastly different view of X than anyone else. Good luck with that, Elon. ,-)
Elon the crybaby Nazi.
Good luck with that 🍿
