X Corp., Plaintiff, vs. Media Matters for America and Eric Hananoki | Hacker News Reader

X Corp., Plaintiff, vs. Media Matters for America and Eric Hananoki

pacermonitor.com

3 pointshnburnsy10 comments

Filing a lawsuit so quickly is a clear indication Musk is using his money and the courts as a weapon. He wants to send a message to the world that if anyone does something he doesn't like, he's prepared to make them suffer; at a minimum to suffer the pain of the cost and time defending a lawsuit.

The merits of the lawsuit are irrelevant to him. It's not as though he is worried that he may have to pay some money later in the event any such lawsuits are deemed to have been frivolous. He can afford it. His goal is to threaten and intimidate the world with the lawsuits his wealth permits him to file.

Speaking of extreme ads on twitter, I was getting these yesterday https://twitter.com/ThatSamWinkler/status/172635496005157320...

>Media Matters executed this plot in multiple steps, as X’s internal investigations have revealed. First, Media Matters accessed accounts that had been active for at least 30 days, bypassing X’s ad filter for new users. 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.

>Tellingly, Media Matters used X’s privacy features in order to hide its methodology from its readers. That is, Media Matters set this account to “private,” blocking anyone from seeing which accounts Media Matters actually followed, thus disallowing anyone from understanding how its feed was manipulated. Indeed, Media Matters at no point includes images with any information about the account that was exposed to these images; the cropped nature of Media Matters’ deceptive screenshots leaves its profile picture out of frame.

I don't believe it really matters to the advertisers how their ads end up alongside extreme, fringe content. The advertisers aren't saying, "it's ok to show our ads next to that content if a user likes that content and our products". Advertisers don't ever want their ads in that context, hard stop.

Is that even possible when serving 90B post impressions and 5B ad impressions per day where some of the fringe content is obfuscated or image-based? I guess if an advertiser's expectation is that one or few unwanted placements are unacceptable, maybe they should not be advertising on the internet, but regardless IMO, MMA should be forth coming on the prevalence and methodology it used.

> Is that even possible

Apparently it is, because up until October of last year, advertisers felt Twitter's ad placements were acceptable and they were not stumbling over each other to abandon the platform.

> ...Only Oracle did not withdraw its ads.

Wasn't Larry in on the X deal?

One of the biggest backers.

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