They’re there for him in his time of need. And they’re prepared to use the power of the state to shut down his critics.
Here’s how the free speech warriors of the right defend the first Amendment:
Elon Musk’s new lawsuit against Media Matters, which X Corp. filed late Monday, has been dismissed by legal experts as a frivolous effort to bully a prominent critic into silence. But some Republicans apparently see this as a feature, not a bug: They are allying themselves with Musk’s effort for precisely this purpose.
Musk’s suit charges that Media Matters deliberately and deceptively harmed X (formerly Twitter) with a widely-publicized investigation showing that posts containing pro-Nazi content appeared on X alongside advertisements from leading companies. That, along with a surge in antisemitic content, has advertisers fleeing the site, sparking a slide in ad revenue.
Republicans are eagerly rushing to Musk’s rescue — and not just rhetorically. Two GOP state attorneys general — Ken Paxton in Texas and Andrew Bailey in Missouri — have responded by announcing vaguely defined investigations into Media Matters.
Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller is urging Republican law enforcement officials to probe Media Matters for “criminal” activity. And Mike Davis, who is touting himself as Donald Trump’s next attorney general, has declared that Media Matters staff members should be jailed.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas, doesn’t deny that the juxtapositions between ads and pro-Nazi postings are real. Rather, it accuses Media Matters of creating an account following only fringe content and endlessly refreshing it until it finally generated the juxtapositions. Those are “extraordinarily rare,” the suit says, but were deliberately engineered to disparage X, harm its revenue stream and interfere with its contracts with advertisers.
It’s a weak case, as experts point out. The Media Matters article said it had “found” the juxtapositions, which X calls “false,” insisting they were “manipulated” into existence. But even if you question Media Matters’s presentation of the facts, it still wouldn’t show that it did “all of this to harm X’s market value,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
“If Media Matters doctored the images and couldn’t replicate those results, then maybe there would be a claim here,” Vladeck told me, stressing that it did prove “possible to see those ads” alongside Nazi-related content. He noted that Media Matters plausibly wrote about these juxtapositions not to hurt X, but because they’re “newsworthy.
They did it to prove that the guardrails Musk insisted were there did not exist. And I’m sure that many, if not all, of the big companies that pulled out verified it. Can you imagine the conversation? The head of marketing sees this story or hears about it and of course asks their ad sales people to check and see if it’s happened to any of their ads and voila. It has. Because we know it has. We’ve all seen it.
Now, Musk can show all the antisemitic drivel he wants on his platform. Media Matters has the right to publish the fact that he’s doing it in violation of his own stated policy against allowing such things to happen. It’s a free country. And needless to say, his advertisers have no obligation to support it.
I think what people are missing in all this is that Musk himself commonly posts antisemitic comments like the one above along with many other odious comments which get massive engagement on the platform and in the media at large. This report was obviously just another in a long line of complaints about twitter since he took over and many advertiser had probably just had enough, particularly after all the assurances the company no doubt made that it was technically impossible for their ads to be shown next to this objectionable content.
We can all see what’s happening on that platform and it’s driving people away by the millions. Why would major advertisers see that as a smart place to sell their products?