Elon Musk Files "Thermonuclear" Lawsuit Against Media Matters, Alleging They Have Slandered His Business and Cost Him Tens of Millions of Dollars

Victoria Taft at PJ Media has details:

The lawsuit states that Twitter/X, as a free speech platform, has been targeted by MMFA for years but recently unleashed an onslaught of stories intended to drive away big advertisers. It succeeded in driving away untold millions in ad revenue from the platform. But MMFA's latest gambit was based on a malicious, outcome-based scam to destroy Elon Musk's free speech platform.

Since Twitter users can curate their own advertising experience, Musk says an internal investigation shows that MMFA used Twitter/X accounts opened slightly more than 30 days ago to "evade content filtering" and then followed only extremist accounts and the platform's largest advertisers, therefore "precision design[ing]" unique pairings of the two in their feed. But, the lawsuit claims, that was still not enough to create the unique and extremist content they wanted to use in their hit pieces. Musk says that to achieve the most damning-looking content, Media Matters had to resort "to endless scrolling and refreshing its unrepresentative, hand-selected feed, generated between 13 and 15 times more advertisements per hour than the typical X user." The lawsuit says this "inauthentic activity" was kept up until MMFA got the desired result: "controversial content next to X's largest advertisers' paid posts."

In its posts damning Musk and Twitter/X, the lawsuit says MMFA claims to have "found" this content, failing to note they'd manipulated the algorithm to achieve it. But as the lawsuit alleges, they didn't "find" it; they "created" it. MMFA then hid from readers and advertisers how the results were manipulated.

They posed questions to advertisers asking if they really wanted to be on a white supremacist, racist platform. Musk doesn't say how many advertisers left and how much money Twitter/X lost in revenue but acknowledges that MMFA's efforts drove away Apple, Comcast, NBCUniversal, and IBM. The only advertiser that didn't take the bait was Oracle. Other advertisers, Lionsgate, Warner Brothers, Discovery, Paramount, and Sony, believed MMFA's hype and yanked their Twitter/X ads.

The pairing of the extremist content and all-star advertisers IBM, Comcast, and Oracle was so unique, the lawsuit says, that it showed up for only one Twitter user--the MMFA-manipulated account--out of all 500 million active users. MMFA's manipulated account was able to get a pairing of Apple and fringe content for only two users out of all Twitter/X users and one of them was Media Matters.

Musk vows he will sue Media Matters' board and even their donors: "all of them."

I'm not hopeful about this lawsuit. Slander and tortious interference with a business contract are supposedly torts that someone can be sued for, but in my experience, judges invoke a range of doctrines to excuse leftwing defamation (while applying a very different standard to right-wing speakers).

We will soon have a judge claiming that outright defamation -- with malicious intent -- is just part of Media Matters' free speech rights and we must not burden those rights by allowing a lawsuit over them.

But of course Disney could sue me at any time for telling the truth and a judge will let that lawsuit drag on for years.

The left is determined to bankrupt Elon Musk so that he gives them their favorite propaganda website back again.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:02 PM

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