Politics X sues Media Matters over report about ads appearing next to Nazi posts

Elon Musk’s social media company, X, sued Media Matters for America and one of its staff members Monday over an investigative report the progressive watchdog published saying that Nazi content ran on the X app alongside advertisements from major corporations.

News of the lawsuit coincided with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s announcement of an investigation into Media Matters for possible fraudulent activity.


“We are examining the issue closely to ensure that the public has not been deceived by the schemes of radical left-wing organizations who would like nothing more than to limit freedom by reducing participation in the public square,” Paxton said in a news release that Musk also posted on X.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said Sunday on X that his team was also looking into the matter. Bailey and Paxton are Republicans.

The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas, sought unspecified damages, as well as an order for Media Matters to remove the article.

Media Matters President Angelo Carusone said the website would defend itself.

“This is a frivolous lawsuit meant to bully X’s critics into silence. Media Matters stands behind its reporting and looks forward to winning in court,” he said in a statement.

The lawsuit is a major escalation of a fight involving Musk, his critics and X’s shaky relationship with advertisers. Musk set off a firestorm last Wednesday when he published comments on X embracing a conspiracy theory that many consider antisemitic, and Media Matters published its report the next day saying Nazi posts had run next to ads from Apple, IBM and other companies.

Many of those advertisers have paused their spending on X in response to the report. (They include Comcast and NBCUniversal. Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)

In the lawsuit, X alleged that Media Matters’ portrayal of the app was untrue because its article did not reflect what typical users see.

“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,” the lawsuit said.

The intention was to harm X’s advertising sales, according to the suit.

Media Matters, a nonprofit website, was founded in 2004 by David Brock, a former right-wing journalist who became a Democrat in the 1990s and is now a political consultant and commentator.

The lawsuit also named as a defendant Eric Hananoki, a senior investigative reporter at Media Matters and the author of the article. Hananoki did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit made a few specific legal claims. One was that Media Matters “intentionally interfered with contracts” between X and its advertisers. A second was that the website disparaged X with false statements and that it did so “with clear malice, well aware of their falsity.” And the third was that it unlawfully interfered with business relationships.

Under the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech as interpreted by the Supreme Court, plaintiffs who are public figures must prove actual malice by other parties to win claims like defamation.

Daxton Stewart, a journalism professor at Texas Christian University and a lawyer, said the lawsuit was “frivolous.” He said that although the lawsuit was framed as defending free speech, it would do the opposite by penalizing a website.

“The huge problem is the First Amendment,” Stewart wrote in an email. “They’re asking a court to order the takedown of clearly protected commentary, and trying to escape the obvious First Amendment issues with that by cloaking it in contract interference language that suggests advertisers left the platform because of a Media Matters report rather than, say, their own judgment at seeing what Twitter has become.”

“It’s utter nonsense, of course, but that’s the way these self-described free speech warriors operate today,” he added. “The goal is to chill free speech, and we can only hope it doesn’t work.”

Musk and X do not dispute that Nazi material exists on the app, and Musk has defended its presence as evidence of free speech. In a statement he posted Friday, he said that of the nine posts highlighted by Media Matters, only one violated X’s content policies. He said X had limited the reach of that post.

The posts highlighted by Media Matters included a denial that the Holocaust happened, a quote about truth attributed to Adolf Hitler next to a photo of him and a post saying the rise of Nazism was a “spiritual awakening.”

Thomas Leatherbury, director of the First Amendment Clinic and a professor of law at Southern Methodist University in Texas, noted that none of the parties to the lawsuit is a citizen of Texas, which suggests "forum shopping," a strategy in which those pursuing a claim seek the most favorable jurisdiction.

He said the lawsuit also raises questions about whether the Texas court has jurisdiction over the defendants and noted that filing it in federal court sidesteps Texas' anti-SLAPP law, meant to deter lawsuits aimed at limiting speech.

As for Paxton's investigation, Leatherbury said he sees it as "a performative political stunt which furthers the troubling trend of punishing speech the AG doesn’t agree with while perversely claiming to encourage more free speech."

He pointed to other efforts by the attorney general's office to limit speech, including its defense of a state social media law aimed at limiting platform moderation and its efforts to prosecute Netflix for distributing the documentary "Cuties."

"The AG’s office and the Texas Legislature keep Texas’s First Amendment lawyers busy all the time," Leatherbury said in an email. "In our Clinic, the mantra is 'Texas, so many First Amendment violations, so little time.'"

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-n...rs-report-ads-appearing-nazi-posts-rcna126095

 

I think you meant " major ass hat".

 

Far-right conspiracy theorists accused a 22-year-old Jewish man of being a neo-Nazi. Then Elon Musk got involved

Ben Brody says his life was going fine. He had just finished college, stayed out of trouble, and was prepping for law school. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Elon Musk used his considerable social media clout to amplify an online mob’s misguided rants accusing the 22-year-old from California of being an undercover agent in a neo-Nazi group.

The claim, Brody told CNN, was as bizarre as it was baseless.

But the fact he bore a vague resemblance to a person allegedly in the group, that he was Jewish, and, that he once stated in a college fraternity profile posted online that he aspired to one day work for the government, was more than enough information for internet trolls to falsely conclude Brody was an undercover government agent (a “Fed”) planted inside the neo-Nazi group to make them look bad.

For Brody, the fallout was immediate. Overnight, he became a central character in a story spun by people seeking to deny and downplay the actions of hate groups in the United States today.

The lies and taunts, which Musk engaged with on social media, turned his life upside down, Brody said. At one point, he said, he and his mother had to flee their home for fear of being attacked.

Now, he’s fighting back.

Brody filed a defamation lawsuit last month against Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter. The suit seeks damages in excess of $1 million. Brody says he wants the billionaire to apologize and retract the false claims about him.

Brody’s lawyer—who is the same attorney who successfully sued conspiracy theorist Alex Jones over his lies about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre —said he hopes the suit will force one of the world’s richest and most powerful men to reckon with his careless and harmful online behavior.

“This case strikes at the heart of something that I think is going really wrong in this country,” attorney Mark Bankston said in an interview with CNN. “How powerful people, very influential people, are being far too reckless about the things they say about private people, people just trying to go about their lives who’ve done nothing to cause this attention.”

Asked for comment on the lawsuit, an attorney for Musk told CNN “we expect this case to be dismissed.” Musk’s lawyers have until Jan 5, 2024, to file their response in court.

On the night of Saturday, June 24, 2023, Ben Brody was in Riverside, California.

About 1,000 miles away, a gay pride event was being held near Portland, Oregon. In recent years, the city has become a flashpoint for often violent clashes over the country’s ongoing culture wars.

It was no great surprise then that the event became a target for rival far-right groups and neo-Nazis who began fighting among themselves while protesting. Video of the skirmish, where the far-right protesters pushed and pulled at each other, quickly spread across social media.

Online conspiracy theorists soon jumped into the fray.

Rather than accept the fact that two far-right groups who have previously embraced violence were responsible for the clash, online trolls insisted it must be a so-called “false flag” event – a set-up of some kind to make the neo-Nazis look bad.

That’s when they found Ben Brody.

‘You’re being accused of being a neo-Nazi…’

The day after the Pride event, Brody began getting text messages from his friends telling him to check out social media.

“You’re being accused of being a neo-Nazi fed,” he recalled some of his friends telling him.

Somehow, someone on social media had found a photo of Brody online and decided he looked like one of the people involved in the clash.

Anonymous people online, self-appointed internet detectives, began digging and found out Brody was Jewish and had been a political science major at the University of California, Riverside. On his college fraternity’s webpage, he had once stated he wanted to work for the government.

“I put that I wanted to work for the government. And that’s just because I didn’t know specifically what part of the government I wanted to work for. You know, I was like, I could be a lawyer,” Brody recalled in an interview with CNN.

His being Jewish was relevant to them because conspiracy theories are often steeped in antisemitism – suggesting there’s a Jewish plan to control the world.

Brody’s social media inboxes filled up with messages, such as “Fed,” “Nazi,” and “We got you.” He and his mom were forced to leave their family home after their address was posted online, he said.

‘Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt)’
Some of Brody’s friends began posting online, trying to correct the record and explain this was a case of mistaken identity. Brody himself posted a video to Instagram where he desperately tried to prove his innocence. He even went as far as getting time-stamped video surveillance footage showing him in a restaurant in Riverside, California, at the time of the brawl in Oregon, as proof he could not have been at the rally.

But to no avail. The conspiracy theory kept spreading across the internet, including on X. But it wasn’t just anonymous trolls fueling the lie. Musk, the platform’s owner, had joined in, amplifying the lie to his millions of followers.

Video from the Oregon event showed the masks of at least one protester being removed during the fight between the opposing far-right groups. Musk asked on X on June 25, “Who were the unmasked individuals?”

Another X user linked to a tweet alleging Brody was one of the unmasked individuals. The tweet highlighted a line from Brody’s fraternity profile that noted he wanted to work for the government after graduation.

The tweet claimed the unmasked alleged member of the far-right group was Brody, pointing out he was a “political science student at a liberal school on a career path towards the feds.”

“Very odd,” Musk responded.

Another user shared the tweet alleging Brody’s involvement and commented, “Remember when they called us conspiracy theorists for saying the feds were planting fake Nazis at rallies?”

“Always remove their masks,” Musk replied.

On June 27, having engaged with conspiracy theories about the subject over a number of days, Musk alleged that the Oregon skirmish was a false flag. “Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt) and another is maybe an Antifa member, but nonetheless a probable false flag situation,” he tweeted.

“I knew that this was snowballing, but once Elon Musk commented, I was like, ‘boom, that’s the final nail in the coffin,’” Brody recalled.

Musk has more followers than anyone else on X – approximately 150 million at the end of June, around the time he tweeted about the fight in Oregon, according to records from the Internet Archive. That tweet has been viewed more than 1.2 million times, according to X’s own data.

Brody worried his name would forever be associated with neo-Nazism, that he wouldn’t be able to get a job. Though he had finished college, he hadn’t yet graduated, and he said some of the accounts messaging him were threatening to contact his university. “My life is ruined,” he thought.

Attempting to clear his name, he gave an interview to Vice.com, which caught the attention of Mark Bankston.

The man who took down Alex Jones

Bankston is best known as the lawyer who successfully took on the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in court on behalf of parents who lost their children in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.

Bankston said Brody’s case is not only an opportunity to help clear the young man’s name but could also force what he views as a necessary conversation about the vitriolic nature of online discourse.

The lawsuit filed last month in Travis County, Texas (the same county in which Bankston successfully sued Jones), alleges Musk’s claims about Brody are part of a “serial pattern of slander” by the billionaire.

Musk, the suit argues, is “perhaps the most influential of all influencers, and his endorsement of the accusation against Ben galvanized other social media influencers and users to continue their attacks and harassment, as well as post accusations against Ben that will remain online forever.”

Soon after he took over Twitter in 2022, Musk said the platform must “become by far the most accurate source of information about the world.”

But, on the contrary, the suit alleges, “Musk has been personally using the platform to spread false statements on a consistent basis while propping up and amplifying the most reprehensible elements of conspiracy-addled Twitter.”

The suit outlines how Musk has engaged with accounts that traffic in racism and antisemitism and lists instances in which he publicly shared or engaged with conspiracy theories – including last October when he shared false claims about the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The suit alleges that in August after Musk was made aware through his lawyers about Brody’s case for defamation, Musk refused to delete his tweets.

Bankston and his client said the lawsuit is about a lot more than money.

“I just want to make things right,” Brody told CNN. “It’s not about vengeance. I’m not angry. It’s not resentment. I just want to make things right, to get an apology, so that this doesn’t happen again to anyone else.”

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/20/business/brody-musk-lawsuit-invs/index.html

 

Elon might be the biggest dumb fuck there is out there. And that's saying a lot because Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Candace Owens, Tomi Lahren, Tucker Carlson, Rudy Guiliani, Roger Stone, Ted Cruz, MGT, Lauren Boebert, Ron Desantis, Greg Abbott, Dinesh D'Souza, Stephen Miller, Nick Fuentes, Steve Bannon and Bill Maher are still alive.

 

I will never forgive him for losing that 8000 dollars.

 

Disagreed