X Corp vs. Media Matters [pdf]
storage.courtlistener.com
storage.courtlistener.com
Using the power of the state to 'investigate' media you don't like is some real free speech absolutism.
The judicial system galvanizing itself into action to defend a once $44B company for... being exposed as posting highly objectionable content next to those who asked & payed to not have that happen for their promotions? The system is defending what here?
Confessed, it seemingly was somewhat extreme ends that Media Matters got up to to make this happen. But the site has been a haven for the worst shit lately, just horrible people who have taken over & loudly proudly usurped the supposedly left-biased site; this seems like a reasonable light that MM have shined, even if it took effort to get the most repugnant vile crap adjacent to sponsors content. MM tried hard to make advert & skum directly adjacent, but the character they revealed seems like what Twitter is & is increasingly overrun by. MM showed the face of modern Twitter accurately.
Being mad over this ill light Twitter allowed on itself is silly but fine. It being legally actionable seems farcical & sad: a nasty bit of spite I don't think journalistic agencies should have to be afraid of. Having multiple various right wing states' attorney generals spring into action to defend the poor unfortunate $44b company that did bad things & got found seems like a horrible abuse of government power to beat up on the media for showing how it is.
> 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.
Good job, Elon.
The self-own is so real with this one.
Ex: If you file a complaint about your boss in good faith, your boss is normally not allowed to retaliate against you.
The lesson is, if you do something Twitter doesn't like, they'll scoop up your data and use it to sue you.
I hadn't realized the second self-own after the enormity of the first.
That said, the Media Matters article starts with quote from X CEO Yaccarino (https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/x-placing-ads-amazon-nb...) specifically saying they put controls in to prevent it. So it seems fair enough for a journalist to check if those controls work. Clearly, they don't in this case. Or the controls are for another case.
I do think Media Matters could have been clearer about its methodology, since I agree with X that making an account that only follows hate accounts and seeing if it shows ads is not really what the article implies. I don't see how serving ads nearby to hateful content is more objectionable really than just having the hateful content in the first place. The connection to ads seems more like a tactic to try to force them into action, which is more activism than journalism.
However, it's crazy to try to sue them for this. It's not illegal and it is mostly accurate! It's especially unacceptable that these virtue-signaling Republican AGs are trying to capitalize on it. Gross!
I mean the lawsuit (and preceding tweets by Yaccarino) allege that they do indeed work and Media Matters effectively committed a denial of service attack of sorts in order to forcibly cause them to appear.
Given that MM documented what they did, and plenty of others have confirmed that behavior, it seems hard to see how MM lied or slandered X.
Some federal circuits (e.g. the 9th) have protections against SLAPP lawsuits. The 5th circuit (where this lawsuit was filed) does not, and the district judge is Reed O'Connor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_O%27Connor) who's infamous for rulings friendly to conservative causes.
The insinuation here is that the venue was chosen to get a judge that is less likely to rule against X/Twitter in those earlier stages and make it more likely that later stages of the trial will be reached.
Normally, the lawsuit template against slander is "The other guy was lying, they were malicious (or reckless) about it, and here's how it damaged us".
In this case, they have multiple paragraphs describing Media Matter's procedure, proving that the screenshots are real. That's a very weak case to stand upon IMO.
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I think Media Matter's defense is simple. The screenshots were real and we have a reason to believe they're representative of Twitter's engagement process.
How does this pass the bar of recklessness for Media Matters?
https://newrepublic.com/article/165730/northern-district-tex...
The real reason Elon is suing in Texas is politically motivated: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1726767436618191177
EDIT: Ken White says that a change of venue would be unlikely to succeed: https://www.threads.net/@matthewrigdon/post/Cz42BAtp_X7
I'm not even sure they need to argue that, given the article itself doesn't seem to make any direct claims with respect to frequency of occurrence.
Granted, I'm not exactly sure how implication is analyzed in defamation cases, but I don't think whatever implication may be present here is particularly strong, if that.
If an individual user has specifically sought out the bad content though, they presumably don't themselves think it is bad, and so they don't have a negative reaction to it and also they don't have a negative view of an advertiser being associated with it. Is it still a problem for the advertiser? It's at least not a public perception problem anymore, more of an edge case of "do I want to encourage antisemites to shop at Target" kind of thing.
Yes, because it's being shown in association with the bad content. That was in your first sentence.
>It's at least not a public perception problem anymore, more of an edge case of "do I want to encourage antisemites to shop at Target" kind of thing.
That's a different thing. Twitter isn't selling antisemite-targeted ads to Target... that's the whole point. Twitter likely agreed with Target to not show its ads in relation to negative content like that. If that negative content is all that you see when you go on twitter, and twitter is still serving you ads, then they are serving their advertisers content in association with this negative content.
TECHNICALLY "placement" is a term of art for adtech which (in my experience working near my adtech coworkers and their products) can only be "successful" vs competitor adtech offerings if it is placed with consideration to the user's data when placing. https://www.google.com/search?q=adtech+term+placement
E.g. give the lady a dog advert if she previously expressed interest in dogs.
It seems like X could be proving the defense's case with their own filing.
Unless I’m missing something.
But the user which posted it, Karl Radl, is very much on the "Hitler was right" train of thought.
The MediaMatters article seemed to follow after.
Otherwise, they were just using X in a strange manner, which is not defamatory in itself.
The wording in dispute appears to be:
> But that [the claim that "brands are now 'protected from the risk of being next to' potentially toxic content."] certainly isn’t the case for at least five major brands: We recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity, and IBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party on X. Here they are: <screenshots>
Nothing is said about how common/rare this occurrence is nor whether anything specific needs to be done to observe such a result.
It may hinge on exactly how strong the 'protection' is that Yaccarino alluded to is inferred to be - whether it's reasonable to infer she meant that content moderation under Musk was now perfected and 100% hateproof, at least with respect to ads.
> X contends no actual users were or ever would be in this same circumstance, so no brand damage was actually done.
If that's what they want to contend then this lawsuit is probably not the right vehicle. They'd probably be better off making that argument to their advertisers.
It may well be a weak case. MM are certainly slimy political operators, but they seem to have mostly avoided any direct statements which are easily, unambiguously provably false.
I'm honestly not sure how that would be legally analyzed. It doesn't really feel like a very convincing argument, but I don't think I can articulate exactly why.
In any case, it doesn't seem that particular line of argument is present in the complaint, so it's pretty much just a curiosity.
This is such a Musk thing. Even Musk from a long time ago.
Making exaggerations and big implications about his products is part of his DNA. Its a huge factor in his success.
For CMOs making major ad buys for carefully curated marquis brands like Apple, IBM, et al, I suspect that the only concrete number that they want to be assured of by their advertising platform is "0".
Too bad Elon fired Twitter/X's Trust and Safety team!
[0] https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1724908287471272299 . I'm including this link even though it's been referenced to death, because reading primary sources is important - especially with people people becoming desensitized to claims of racism from a media landscape that often takes things out of context and heavily paraphrases to blow them out of proportion, which is decidedly not what happened here.
For example imagine that it takes exploits, URL editing, or something similar to do it. The question here really is how much effort you really need to put in to get it to happen.
Claiming that the problem is "routine" might be problematic, but I think the problem being "serious" may arguably be non-defamatory. A problem being "routine" implies there's a pattern, which can potentially be proven/disproven, but whether a problem is "serious" seems much more opinion-based. One advertiser may not care that their ads have a minuscule chance of showing up next to objectionable content, and another one may care very much that there's a non-zero chance.
Media Matters set up a test account that showed that it was possible for X's algorithm to pair ads with objectionable content. Given that, how can X claim that "no company has its ads run next to anti semitic content in general" when Media Matters has shown that it is possible? Unless Media Matters "photoshopped" or otherwise manufactured the results--but that isn't what the filing claims. They claim that MM set up a few small accounts following only a few other accounts-fringe content and brand advertisers--and then scrolled through the feed until they found something bad.
The line in the filing that mentions that MM's tests used existing accounts to get by new member restrictions shows the fragile nature of X's arguments. Most real-life users are going to have existing accounts, so it's that experience you want to check, not the highly-constrained environment X puts new subscribers into because they don't trust them yet.
Customers like Apple, Comcast, NBCUniversal and IBM, are sophisticated ad buyers that wouldn't let a single story change their buying strategies without additional information/confirmation from X. If they made the choice to leave X, I'd bet that the Media Matters story was the last straw, not the first one. And it's quite possible that the Media Matters story was the result--rather that the cause--of those companies' decision to leave the platform in the first place.
While X is trying to spin this a Media Matters "did bad things" to convince Apple, IBM, Comcast, and NBCUniversal to stop advertising with X, it is far more likely that the highly volatile and bombastic behavior of X over the last year had far more to do with that result than Media Matters' article did.
https://fortune.com/2023/11/20/inside-twitter-x-all-hands-af...
Archived: https://archive.is/tkT3c
They said twitter was going to fail over nearly everything, and I believed them until I lost money on the betting markets.
It's clear Elon is not dumb or incompetent, I wonder what his real move is here?
Media Matters will hopefully lose their lawsuit, be liable for X's losses and be destroyed. They've clearly been passing off heavily manipulated scenarios to advertisers as if they were representative of the average user's experience, for the sole and explicit purpose of waging left wing ideological war against the only tech company willing to defy them, which is a behavior harmful for society overall especially as it's an attack on a more or less public square. You don't see commercial competitors engaging in such manipulative and aggressive attacks like that much, if at all, probably because they are run by rationally self-interested people who don't want to wreck their organization by starting legal fights over ideology.
Unfortunately even if X does win presumably Media Matters has little money to make amends, and there are hundreds of similar leftist NGOs dotted across the landscape using aggressive manipulation to police what people are allowed to say, many of which are just very thin proxies for the US government (see the Twitter Files for examples of that). This problem isn't specific to X, pretty much any organization that isn't explicitly leftist will find that its advertisers are all being constantly harassed and libelled by NGO activists. The UK's attempt at a conservative TV news channel constantly faces this problem as well, as do any conservative news websites or blogs.
A real fix for this type of behavior will probably require law changes to strip the corporate veil from non-profit board members, such that they become personally liable for legal costs of the non-profit itself. Limited liability is useful to grant to for-profit companies because they often take actual and serious risks with large amounts of capital, so there needs to be some shield against that risk becoming of uncontrollable size. But the NGO sector doesn't risk capital to build anything productive. One of the very few that did was OpenAI and we're seeing how that plays out right now.
Stop whining. Please Elon, stop whining. People don't respect you as much? It doesn't matter, just, stop whining, and stop lying to justify your whining. I don't care that you've done mistakes. You're allowed to as long as you're accountable.
Stop whining. This is becoming old. Organize meetings, art expositions, do some shit, play role-playing games, idk, but please, people do not really care. At most I'll read stuff like that for the drama, but really, live your life and stop whining.
As the Germans say, "Schadenfreude ist die schönste Freude" (Schadenfreude is the most beautiful happiness). Yeah it's not a good trait of mine, I'll admit.
And as Napoleon didn't say, "Never interrupt your enemy while he's busy making a mistake" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/06/never-interfere/
I'm just tired of the US news having yet again whining as a defensive mechanism. It started with Hillary, then Trump, and now this. I'm just tired of US news I guess.
Frankly, I think this is the only reason countries with more plaintiff-friendly defamation laws, like the UK, haven’t been forced to reform them; it is such bad press for public figures to actually use them, particularly in nonsense cases like this, that they mostly don’t.