On Saturday, X owner Elon Musk announced his plans to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters for America, a liberal media “watchdog” group over an alleged attempt to “mislead advertisers” on the social media platform.
An article published by Media Matters last week, which amounted to little more than a hit piece regarding the X’s new regard for its users’ freedom of speech, led several large advertisers to pause advertisement spending on the platform. The article accused Musk of giving credence to “white nationalist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” and his company of placing “ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.”
Apple, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Lionsgate, Discovery, and Paramount Global were among the large corporations that paused ads on X following Media Matter’s accusations.
“IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” an IBM spokesperson told the Guardian.
Musk’s fiery response received an outpour of support from conservative X users.
“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,” Musk wrote on X.
“These groups try to use their influence to attack our revenue streams by deceiving advertisers on X,” he added. In the statement shared on X, Musk said that Media Matters “created an alternate account and curated the posts and advertising appearing on the account’s timeline to misinform advertisers about the placement of their posts.” After doing this, “they repeatedly refreshed their timelines to find a rare instance of ads serving next to the content they chose to follow. Our logs indicate that they forced a scenario resulting in 13 times the number of ads served compared to the median ads served to an X user,” according to Musk.
The social media giant owner also claimed that out of “5.5 billion ad impressions on X that day, less than 50 total ad impressions were served against all of the organic content featured in the Media Matters article.”
Musk later shared, “Media Matters is pure evil.”
The social media platform’s new CEO, Linda Taccarino, whom X users were initially skeptical about, also posted, “Protecting the freedom of speech could not be more urgent and important. Now, more than ever!”
