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After a devastating advertiser exodus last week involving some of the world’s largest media companies, X owner Elon Musk is suing the progressive watchdog group Media Matters over its analysis highlighting antisemitic and pro-Nazi content on X — a report that appeared to play a significant role in the massive and highly damaging brand revolt.
The lawsuit filed Monday accuses Media Matters of distorting how likely it is for ads to appear beside extremist content on X, alleging that the group’s testing methodology was not representative of how real users experience the site.
“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 complaint filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas said. “Media Matters designed both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”
Actually he released this statement admitting that it did happen, but wants us to think he’s been wronged because someone curated a feed then hit refresh a bunch of times, and only a couple of people saw it, so it doesn’t count.
And by this CNN report it sounds like he’s now misrepresenting their own findings.
Exactly. He’s not saying it didn’t happen but rather it’s not typical.
He’s apparently saying they “manufactured images” in the lawsuit which is a weird way of describing “refreshed until our system natively generated this.”
Could be a messy enough distinction to confuse a judge or jury into thinking they were manufacturing it
Possibly. Hopefully not.
That’s how Tesla won their most recent case with an autopilot failure. They acknowledge that the car did indeed drive itself into a tree. But that the company did not knowingly sell a defective product as they routinely update the vehicle.
That wasn’t the argument that won the day for them, but it was the argument that allowed them to start on a way more technical footing that would allow them to misdirect the court to focus more on any driver impairments.
Musk’s lawyers are insanely good at misdirection, they are some of the best at this one particular thing. Additionally, the case was file in an incredibly friendly court to Musk, so it’s likely the Judge will be willing to go down the rabbit hole of insanely technical arguments while losing sight of the more broad questions.
There is a lot stacked up against Media Matters here.
All good points, except then they were on defense. Now they’re on offense trying to accuse someone else of malicious harm, when all MM did was create a new profile, then follow accounts and refresh. Sure, it was an abnormal amount of times unless you’re a caffeinated doomscroller, but otherwise they didn’t fake or insert anything. So it would seem like MM is on at least as good of defense footing here. Maybe.
Yeah, I dont see how twitters argument that “they followed nazis and looked at their pages enough to see these ads from major corporations” is some kind of slam dunk.
I mean, yeah, thats how you have your website setup. You let nazis on, you let people follow them, and you put ads next to nazis. Sounds like thats what twitter specifically designed to happen, and they are enraged that soemone proved it.
Pretty fucking stupid lawsuit.
Even that is wrong though. Every few posts, Nazi or not, is going to have an ad next to it. The numbers they are talking about are mostly irrelevant.
The statement from exTwitter is not showing total numbers. It’s only referencing against what Media Matters showcased.
Yeah. That statement isn’t doing him any good.
If 50 out of 5.5 billion were odds to win the mega jackpot lottery, sure. The chances seem insignificant and super low.
The problem is, 5.5 billion numbers are being rolled every day and 50 people out of a much smaller selection pool are going to win. So, if X has a total of 2000 advertisers that give a shit about ad placement, someone has a high chance of winning. Multiple times.
The actual odds are based off of the total number of advertisers and are only loosely based on total ad impressions. Here is what I mean: Every tweet, antisemitic or not, will be close to an ad and not all advertisers care where their ads land. If you find a Nazi, you will find an ad.
You can start doing the math about the actual distance a tweet is from an ad and stuff. Whatever.
This is the important bit: 50 out of 5.5 billion was just what Media Matters showcased and absolutely does not show the entire problem. It’s much worse.
I hope MM has a statistics expert to point this out in court.
It’s less about statistics and more about deception in my opinion. Numbers are almost always meaningless in papers that excessively use bold type and underlined words.
The function of the paper wasn’t to prove anything. It was to get idiots focused on its false concept of freedom of speech. Even if my math assumptions are wrong, it doesn’t matter and was never the point of the paper.
Hmmm, understood. Well hopefully they’ll get whatever expert they need to explain that.
“We think free speech is important unless that speech is being mean to us” is the biggest crybaby bullshit in the world.
That’s been his playbook since before buying Twitter.