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After Elon Musk threatened a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters Friday, his company X (formerly Twitter) sued the media watchdog group on Monday for defamation, alleging the non-profit “maliciously” tried to drive away advertisers after it published a report on ads appearing alongside posts featuring antisemitic rhetoric.
”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,” X alleged in a lawsuit filed in a Nevada federal court. “Media Matters designed both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”
X claimed that the non profit had “manipulated the algorithms governing the user experience on X to bypass safeguards and create images of X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts adjacent to racist, incendiary content, leaving the false impression that these pairings are anything but what they actually are: manufactured, inorganic, and extraordinarily rare.”
On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also announced that he is “opening an investigation into Media Matters for potential fraudulent activity.”
Last week, Muskwrote,“You have said the actual truth” in response to a post from an X user claiming Jewish people were responsible for promoting “dialectical hatred against whites.” The following morning, Media Matters published astudyshowing ads for major companies alongside posts featuring neo-Nazi content. The report triggered an exodus of advertisers from the platform including Apple, Disney, IBM, Sony, Paramount, and Warner Bros.
The White House later slammed Musk for endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory. “It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act ofAntisemitismin American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” White House spokesman Andrew Batessaid in a statement, adding that the White House “condemn[s] this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”
The billionaire has long declared himself afree speech absolutist. In practice, however, Musk has taken steps to throttle links tocompetitor platformsincluding Substack, Bluesky and Threads;suspended journalistshe dislikes, and limited traffic tospecific media sites.
He has also repeatedly denied that he is antisemitic, saying in apostresponding to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that he is “pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind.” X CEO Linda Yaccarino has tried toplay damage control, reassuringadvertisers and users that the platform does not tolerate hate speech against Jews or any other minorities, per a tweet on Nov. 16. Her lip service drew harsh criticism online, with one X userasking, “[H]ow many times are you gonna try to run interference for [Musk] like this before you just resign?”
In October 2022, Musk promised advertisers that the platformwould not become a“free-for-all hellscape”once he was in charge. A few months after the billionaire took ownership of the social media platform, The New York Timesreleased a reportshowing that hate speech on the platform had risen dramatically his takeover.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone called the lawsuit “frivolous,” and said it was “meant to bully X’s critics into silence.” Carusone added, “Media Matters stands behind its reporting and looks forward to winning in court.”
