Republican Attorneys General Join Musk’s Campaign Against a Left-Wing Press Watchdog, Media Matters

Billionaire Elon Musk’s threats against Media Matters are escalating online as Republican officials line up against the liberal press watchdog over its report showing that X placed ads for major brands next to antisemitic posts.In the wake of a Media Matters report that showed the platform formerly known as Twitter placing ads for major companies next to posts promoting Hitler, Nazis, and Holocaust denial, among other things, Mr. Musk has taken to making threats against the outlet.Initially, Mr. Musk promised to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against the publication, a lawsuit that he eventually did file. Mr. Musk has also called the publication “pure evil.”Now, Mr. Musk is responding to posts of him wielding a sword with what appear to be more threats against Media Matters, though it’s not named in his tweet.“There is a large graveyard filled with my enemies. I do not wish to add to it, but will if given no choice,” Mr. Musk said. “Those who pick fights with me do so at their own peril, but maybe this is their lucky day.”As Mr. Musk pursues his social media campaign against Media Matters, some Republican officials are looking to get in on any legal action taken against the company.Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, told Newsmax that he’s looking into the Media Matters report, saying, “Elon Musk has done so much to protect our rights to First Amendment free speech.”“If we’ve got an instance where there was a deceptive or fraudulent business practice where Media Matters was using some sort of coercive or fraudulent advertising, that’s going to be problematic under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act,” Mr. Bailey said. Mr. Bailey will be joining the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, in using his office to investigate Media Matters for its reporting and any potential damages that might have resulted, saying in a conversation on “The Charlie Kirk Show” that “we have a right as the state of Texas to go after those damages.” “We can take away their ability to do business in Texas so they wouldn’t be able to operate here,” Mr. Paxton said. “Another measure was to go after them for any type of damages.”In the lawsuit filed by X, attorneys argue that Media Matters “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.”According to X’s lawyers, this resulted in 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.”X’s lawyers went on to claim that reporters at Media Matters then “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.”While it’s not clear whether the allegations leveled by X in the lawsuit are true or would rise to the level of fraud if true, a finding against Media Matters could be a major blow against the partisan publication.In response to the lawsuit, the Media Matters president, Angelo Carusone, called Mr. Musk’s self-described thermonuclear lawsuit “frivolous” and “meant to bully X’s critics into silence.”“Media Matters stands behind its reporting and looks forward to winning in court,” Mr. Carusone said in a statement.In conversation with the Washington Post, Mr. Carusone said he looked forward to pursuing discovery if the lawsuit is not dismissed, saying it could allow for probing whether X leadership “knew internally” that ads were appearing near posts like the ones contained in the report.Mr. Carusone also noted that in the discovery phase, the court could establish whether Mr. Musk’s “seeming endorsement of the white genocide worldview” was reason enough for “advertisers to reassess.”The most recent leg of the conflict between Mr. Musk and Media Matters kicked off with Mr. Musk replying to a post by an account called The Artist Formerly Known as Eric, claiming that Jewish people in Western countries had been bringing in “hordes of minorities” and “hatred against whites.”“Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” the account said in a post.The post appears to endorse the “Great Replacement Theory,” which posits that Jewish elites are plotting to destroy Western countries by attempting to replace them with non-white people through miscegenation and so-called white genocide.The “Great Replacement Theory” has been tied to multiple mass murders in recent years, including the 2018 murder of 11 worshippers at Tree of Life Congregation synagogue at Pittsburgh and the murder of 10 people at a supermarket at Buffalo last year.“I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s— now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much,” the post continued. Mr. Musk responded, saying, “You have said the actual truth.” The billionaire has since said he is not antisemitic and that stories claiming he is are “totally bogus,” despite his behavior online.“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Mr. Musk said in a tweet. “I wish only the best for humanity and a prosperous and exciting future for all.”While some, like Missouri’s attorney general, characterize Mr. Musk as a warrior for free speech online, the company’s compliance with government requests for censorship has actually increased since Mr. Musk took over, according to an analysis of Harvard University’s Lumen Database by a news outlet, Rest of World.Its analysis found that under Mr. Musk, X’s rate of compliance with requests by governments to remove posts or provide data has risen to more than 80 percent from about 50 percent.The increase in the rate of compliance has risen alongside the actual number of requests, with Germany, Turkey, and India being the governments that most frequently request censorship or personal data from X.

Republican Attorneys General Join Musk’s Campaign Against a Left-Wing Press Watchdog, Media Matters

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