Posted on 11/21/2023 6:27:53 AM PST by Red Badger
X, formerly known as Twitter, sued Media Matters for America in federal court for defamation Monday.
The social media site accuses the left-wing media watchdog of manufacturing images showing advertisements from major corporations alongside posts made by white supremacists and neo-Nazis in the 15-page complaint filed in the United States District court for the Northern District of Texas. Musk threatened to sue Media Matters in a Saturday post on X, following the group’s Thursday release of a report that prompted an exodus of advertisers, including Disney, Apple, Paramount and IBM.
“Looking to portray X’s social networking platform as being dominated by ‘white nationalist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,’ 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 lawsuit says.
X detailed how it believed the left-wing non-profit got the screenshots used in the report in the lawsuit.
“Media Matters accessed accounts that had been active for at least 30 days, bypassing X’s ad filter for new users,” the lawsuit says. “Media Matters then exclusively followed a small subset of users consisting entirely of accounts in one of two categories: those known to produce extreme, fringe content, and accounts owned by X’s big-name advertisers. The end result was a feed precision-designed by Media Matters for a single purpose: to produce side-by-side ad/content placements that it could screenshot in an effort to alienate advertisers. But this activity still was not enough to create the pairings of advertisements and content that Media Matters aimed to produce.”
“Media Matters therefore resorted to endlessly scrolling and refreshing its unrepresentative, hand-selected feed, generating between 13 and 15 times more advertisements per hour than viewed by the average X user repeating this inauthentic activity until it finally received pages containing the result it wanted: controversial content next to X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts,” the lawsuit continued.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger, who previously reported on the Twitter files, said in a Monday afternoon post that he was unable to replicate what Media Matters claimed it observed on Twitter.
“Public attempted to reproduce Media Matters’ methods to see if we found ads next to the content in question. We created an account and followed eleven of the neo-Nazi accounts in Media Matters’ report starting yesterday, November 19,” Shellenberger posted. “After refreshing both X’s “For You” page and “Following” page more than ten times and scrolling through the timeline each time, we did not observe ads next to white nationalist or pro-Nazi content.”
“We followed more extremist accounts and repeated this process after following thirty accounts. Still, we did not find ads on the timeline,” Shellenberger continued. “We also opened each account’s page and did not observe ads there. Nor did we find ads under the replies to their posts.”
Chris Pavlovski, CEO of Rumble, a free-speech competitor to YouTube, spoke out Monday.
“X is not alone,” Pavlovski posted on X. “I can also confirm that Media Matters has purposely misrepresented Rumble. Their dishonesty warrants an immediate investigation at the highest levels (hint, @SpeakerJohnson & @Jim_Jordan), and I’ll bring the receipts.”
Pavlovski attached an image with a lengthier statement to the post on X.
Media Matters did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
LAWSUIT DOCS:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24172809-x-v-media-matters-complaint-filestamped-1
They did a similar thing to Rumble
Chris Pavlovski
@chrispavlovski
·
14h
X is not alone.
I can also confirm that Media Matters has purposely misrepresented Rumble. Their dishonesty warrants an immediate investigation at the highest levels (hint,
@SpeakerJohnson
&
@Jim_Jordan
), and I’ll bring the receipts.
Here’s my statement:
https://twitter.com/chrispavlovski/status/1726745030470119588
Looks like Rumble also has the “ crazy cat lady” in its cross hairs
Chris Pavlovski
@chrispavlovski
·
15h
Dear
@nandoodles
@catthekin
@CheckMyAdsHQ
, preserve all your documents.
It would be like if somebody opened an account here on Free Republic, posted some anti-semitic material, and then took a screenshot and went running to the media to get Free Republic labeled as an anti-semitic site.
How can anybody defend this?
Sam, I’ve come to believe nowadays there are about just as many leftwing trolls on FR as there are honest America-living patriots who want to save this country. Their goal is to convince us to throw our hands up into the air and surrender.
Note to self….. Don’t and I mean Don’t piss off a Billionaire who can hire an army of lawyers to make my life miserable and costly….. just a good plan for life….
Suck on that, Democrats! Lawfare works both ways! And don't you know they are going to SQUEAL over the 'unfairness' of it!
It sure seems that way.
Soros and anyone connected with him (Insert #JihadJunta here) are criminals and traitors.
Didn’t Trump’s company sue them too.
Trump, Musk and Rumble, a billion dollars each.
I hope they win
“That was a promise not a threat”
Well Musk definitely has the deepest of the deep pockets to follow through with a lawsuit. Media Matters may have just screwed with wrong Billionaire.
“ And now TX AG Paxton is opening an investigation.”
I read the Missouri AG is as well.
“It is horrible what Media Matters did. I can’t believe there were Freepers defending them yesterday.”
It’s because Musk is a bad man. He makes electric cars. /s
Personally, I’m very glad he’s the richest man in the world. He’s mostly putting his money to good use.
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