Elon Musk’s social media company in order to “drive advertisers off the platform and destroy X Corp.”
Advertisers have fled an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
IBM, NBCUniversal and its parent company Comcast said last week they stopped advertising on X after the event Media report they claimed that their ads appeared alongside material praising the Nazis. The Media Matters report also pointed to ads from Apple and Oracle appearing next to anti-Semitic material on X, and the group said it found ads from Amazon, NBA Mexico, NBCUniversal and others next to white nationalist hashtags.
Other major companies including Apple, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and Paramount Global (the parent company of CBS) announced they would pull advertising from the platform. It was a new setback as the platform tries to win back big brands and their advertising dollars, X’s main source of revenue.
But San Francisco-based X experiment on the platform.”
X’s complaint alleges that Media Matters “manipulated the algorithms that govern the user experience on the false impression that these pairings are anything but what they really are: manufactured, inorganic, and extraordinarily rare.”
The filing followed Musk’s post over the weekend in which he promised: “Court opens Monday, X Corp will file a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and EVERYONE who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”
Media Matters, which is based in Washington, D.C., responded to the lawsuit Monday evening with a statement from its president, Angelo Carusone, saying: “This is a frivolous lawsuit intended to force critics of relationship. “
Carusone said in an earlier statement that Media Matters will continue its work. “If he sues us, we will win,” he said.
In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Carusone said the group’s findings suggested that the security protections advertised by X were failing to prevent ads from appearing next to malicious content.
“If you search for white nationalist content, there are ads that flourish. The system they say exists doesn’t work as such,” he said.
Shortly after X announced his lawsuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a statement saying his office would investigate Media Matters for “potentially fraudulent activity,” echoing X’s claim that The non-profit organization allegedly manipulated its results.
Advertisers have been nervous about X since Musk’s acquisition more than a year ago. Under his ownership, the site has drastically reduced its workforce, loose its Trust and Safety Advisory Group and eliminated the user verification system.
In July, Musk posted that the site he paid $44 billion for had “negative cash flow” due to a “~50% decline in ad revenue and a heavy debt load.”
Musk has also sparked protests with his posts, including one last week in which he responded to a user who accused Jews of “pushing… hatred against white people” by writing, “You told the truth.”
Musk has been accused of tolerating anti-Semitic messages on the platform since he bought it last year. Under his ownership, X rolled back rules that removed “violent hateful content” from the platform, the Anti-Defamation League said in a June statement relationship. According to ADL analysis, 27% of online harassment in the first half of 2023 occurred on X, compared to 21% in 2022.
Linda Yaccarino, CEO of
“I think this is something we can and should all agree on,” he wrote on the platform last week.
