Elon Musk’s X has announced plans to sue leftist nonprofit Media Matters, and has blasted major corporations as “oppressors of your right to free speech” as his social media company battles a new wave of advertiser boycotts.
“This week Media Matters for America posted a story that completely misrepresented the real user experience on X, in another attempt to undermine freedom of speech and mislead advertisers,” said X/Twitter in a statement refuting Media Matters’ research.
In a tweet in the early hours of Saturday morning, Musk said, “The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”
The company accuses Media Matters of manipulating the public and advertisers by curating its timeline to “misinform advertisers about the placement of their posts.”
X alleges that of the 5.5 billion ad impressions served on the platform on the day Media Matters released its report accusing the platform of displaying ads next to “pro-Nazi” content, just 50 total ad impressions were displayed next to the content cherrypicked by the nonprofit.
A number of corporations have joined the latest boycott against X, including Apple, Disney, Sony Pictures, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Paramount, Warner Bros, and Lionsgate.
Musk took the boycott as an opportunity to promote X’s new premium $16 subscription service. The $16 tier includes a blue checkmark, ad revenue sharing, access to the Grok AI chatbot, and an ads-free experience.
“Premium+ also has no ads in your timeline,” said Musk. “Many of the largest advertisers are the greatest oppressors of your right to free speech.”
The Media Matters report capitalized on a firestorm of outrage sparked by Musk agreeing with a user’s post that Jewish organizations had supported a “dialectical hatred against whites” that is now being turned on them in the context of the Israel-Gaza conflict. Musk later clarified that the target of his criticism was liberal organizations claiming to represent all Jews, in particular the Anti-Defamation League.
That post Musk concurred with had been made in a response to an ad against antisemitism that featured a white working class father lecturing his son about antisemitic posts online. Many X users took issue with the ad, given that surveys consistently show that minorities are more likely to hold anti-Semitic viewpoints than white people.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
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