Media matters accuses of manipulating data to attack Musk
Billionaire Elon Musk warned conservative media assassin Media Matters for America (MMFA) he'd sue the "news" outlet for not just lying about his Twitter/X platform, but for the mendacious way the George Soros-bankrolled website manipulated data to depict it as a racist outlet that is a "risky and unsafe platform for advertisers." On Friday, Musk issued the threat to go "thermonuclear" on the outlet and "their board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them," and by Monday afternoon had detonated a 15-page lawsuit filed in Texas federal court (read it below).
Musk's lawsuit claims that MMFA, "undeterred by truth," went beyond its "twenty articles and counting"—November attack stories—and manipulated data and the Twitter/X algorithm to make it look as if major companies had their ads placed next to racist content.
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.
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This appears to be a sinister attempt to destroy a free speech platform that has content they disagree with. If Musk and company can prove what they are asserting I think they have a good lawsuit and the damages are probably more than MMFA can manage.
See also:
And:
Musk Takes Stand Against ‘Extreme Violence,’ Anti-Semitism on X
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Leftist Attempts to Destroy Elon Musk Won't Work in Time for 2024
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They're fighting this battle on many fronts. The coordinated effort to ruin Elon Musk is a big part of the effort. In 2020, the Democrats had complete control of all of the major social media platforms, which they used to keep critical information from the American public, particularly the younger voters. Dissenting conservative voices were shut down. News about Hunter Biden's laptop was made to disappear.
When Musk acquired Twitter, he greatly upset their plans for a repeat performance in 2024. They stomped their feet and tried to create alternative platforms and have been whining about Musk and what he's done to Twitter ever since.
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