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Ben Weingarten

Federalist Senior Contributor; Claremont Institute Fellow

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Musk’s legal battle with Media Matters is a defense for free speech

Nov 28, 2023

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Elon Musk’s X is suing Media Matters for America following a report alleging Nazi content on the social media platform appeared alongside advertisements from major companies like Apple and Comcast. Media Matters called the lawsuit “frivolous” and accused X of trying to silence critics.

Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten explains the motivation behind the lawsuit and stresses the importance of standing up against those trying to silence champions of free speech.

Media Matters takes the brand safety model and puts it on steroids. X generates the vast majority of its revenue from paid ads, so Media Matters’ crusade clearly aims to kill X. Why? Because under Musk, X is the one major platform to strike back at the censorship industrial complex and try to restore a modicum of free and open discourse.

The government and the legacy media and the world of fact-checkers, mis- and disinformation-focused think tanks and research centers can’t stand this. They need to control the platforms to control the flow of communications, and also the content of communications to ensure that favored narratives prevail and disfavored ones die, because monopolizing the narrative is essential to maintaining and perpetuating power.

If we’re a republic, we must defund and dismantle the censorship industrial complex, and that means both changing the law and lawfare [sic] like Musk is waging against Media Matters.

Elon Musk has opened a new front in the war for free speech. He comes into Fort Worth federal court. There his social media platform X launched the legal missile against Media Matters for America, the longtime left wing, speech assassin and smear merchant that masquerades as a progressive Research and Information Center. X alleges the nonprofit which was founded by Democrat Hitman David Brock, is funded by people like progressive billionaire George Soros and fixates on canceling conservative voices is now laser focused on obliterating the platform formerly known as Twitter. Media Matters sought to defame and damage the platform by playing the dirtiest of dirty tricks. According to excess suit, quote, looking to portray excess social networking platform as being dominated by white nationalist and anti semitic conspiracy theories. Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side by side images depicting advertisers posts on X corpse 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. Unquote. Media Matters apparently and manipulated axes algorithms to cook up the desired guilt by association. Per X’s investigation, the scheme worked like this. First, the tax exempt left wing attack dog created an account to follow fringe X users on the one hand, and x’s largest paid advertisers, major corporations like Apple, Comcast and IBM on the other. Then the nonprofit scrolled and scrolled and refresh and refresh the inauthentic accounts feeds. So they would generate 13 to 15 times more ads per hour than you were I would say, until it could get pairings of pernicious content. Next to pay it adds in one instance, per x, one of the platform’s 500 million users other than Media Matters. So I pairing the progressive attack dog produced. In most cases, the fake Media Matters account was the only one in the world to render a poisonous pairing. Independent publications that tried could not replicate Media Matters results. Having engineered these outcomes, Media Matters, then publicize them as part of a quote, strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp. Unquote. According to the lawsuit, this charade worked, a charade by the way, coming from the left, which has proven overwhelmingly sympathetic to the actual Nazis of Hamas and hostile to its would be Jewish conquerors in Israel. After Media Matters circulated these findings, so called on its website, X says every company featured in the report Apple, Comcast, IBM and NBC Universal, except Oracle pulled its ads from the platform. This sinister practice of pressuring big businesses into pulling advertising from websites. Left wing tattletales dislike is nothing new. There’s a whole brand safety industry. It’s like a protection racket, where corporations or their ad agencies pay third parties to tell them where not to advertise. So leftists activist won’t badmouth and boycott the companies. entities like news guard and the global disinformation index are pioneers in this censorship as a service business. They basically blacklist conservative and other dissenting outlets by grading them on the extent to which they trafficking myths and disinformation. And of course, it’s totally subjective and there’s little due process. When your media business gets a low grade, it tarnishes its reputation and causes advertisers to recoil, drying up critical revenue streams, and of course damaging your brand. Media Matters takes the brand safety model and puts it on steroids. X generates the vast majority of its revenue from paid ads. So Media Matters crusade clearly aims to kill x, y, because under Musk x is the one major platform to strike back at the censorship industrial complex, and try to restore a modicum of free and open discourse. The government and the legacy media and the world have fact checkers and missing disinformation focus think tanks and research centers can’t stand this. They need to control the platforms to control the flow of communications and also the content of communications to ensure that favored narratives prevail, and disfavored ones die, because monopolizing the narrative is essential to maintaining and perpetuating power. If we’re a republic, we must defund and dismantle the censorship industrial complex, and that means both changing the law and law fair like Musk is waging against Media Matters.

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