Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter and vowed to restore freedom of speech on social media, a lot of people have been out to get him.
The billionaire CEO closed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter on Oct. 27, 2022, and the next day tweeted this: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”
Just one month later, he tweeted, “A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition. They broke the deal.”
Related: A practical case against censorship
We’ve been living through a war over the existence of freedom of speech in America. If you haven’t been keeping up with it, here’s a short summary: The U.S. government, including the intelligence agencies and the FBI, pressured and coerced social media platforms to censor and suppress the constitutionally protected free speech of Americans. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he exposed it. At the same time, lawsuits filed by people who were censored and suppressed exposed even more of it. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering one of these lawsuits and a decision is expected by June. It will probably be the most consequential First Amendment case in American history.
That case was previously known as Missouri v. Biden, now called Murthy v. Missouri.
The First Amendment makes clear that the government is prohibited from “abridging the freedom of speech,” but what has been exposed is a carefully crafted workaround. The U.S. government organized and funded third-party groups to do “research” on everything that everyone was saying on the internet and how widely that speech was disseminated. The government then “flagged” certain content and individuals and pressured social media companies to remove them.
It was mass surveillance and mass censorship. It was also election interference on a mass scale. Just to take one example, the FBI falsely informed social media companies that “Russian disinformation” involving Hunter Biden would be coming, and then weeks before the 2020 election, when the New York Post broke the true and accurate story that there was evidence of Biden family influence-peddling found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer, the Post’s story was censored and suppressed across social media platforms. The Post itself was locked out of its Twitter account for allegedly spreading disinformation.
The effort to stop Elon Musk from allowing free speech on the platform he renamed X is ongoing. The latest attack came from Media Matters for America, which describes itself on its website as a “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”
On Nov. 16, Media Matters published an article asserting in its headline that “X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content,” with the sub-headline, “CEO Linda Yaccarino previously claimed that brands are ‘protected from the risk of being next to’ toxic posts.”
All the companies mentioned in the article suspended their advertising on Twitter, with the exception of Oracle.
On Saturday, Elon Musk vowed to file a “thermonuclear” lawsuit as soon as the courts opened on Monday morning. And he did.
The lawsuit charges that 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. Media Matters designed both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”
Media Matters created an X account and waited 30 days in order to evade the company’s “new user” filter, the lawsuit states, citing internal company data. Then the Media Matters account “exclusively followed a small subset of users consisting entirely of accounts in one of two categories: those known to produce extreme, fringe content, and accounts owned by X’s big-name advertisers.”
In all, 30 accounts were followed. “The end result was a feed precision-designed by Media Matters for a single purpose: to produce side-by-side ad/content placements that it could screenshot in an effort to alienate advertisers,” the lawsuit states. But when that was not enough to generate the result desired, Media Matters “resorted to endlessly scrolling and refreshing its unrepresentative, hand-selected feed, generating between 13 and 15 times more advertisements per hour than viewed by the average X user, repeating this inauthentic activity until it finally received pages containing the result it wanted: controversial content next to X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts.”
According to the lawsuit, there are over 500 million active monthly users on X, but the paid ads from IBM, Comcast and Oracle were seen side-by-side with fringe content by only one user — Media Matters itself. Apple’s paid ads were seen adjacent to extremist posts by only two users, and one of them was Media Matters.That would make the article a hoax, not an authentic report on X’s user experience, content moderation or the protections that the company provides to advertisers.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office announced that it will investigate Media Matters for America for “potential fraudulent activity.”
The online publication Wired fretted that this will have a “chilling effect” on others who are “monitoring” X.
That’s just Orwellian. The “chilling effect” is what happens when people are afraid to speak freely, which has been the goal of the entire Censorship Industrial Complex, as journalist Michael Shellenberger has termed it.
Americans have now gone through several election cycles with the public discourse distorted by censorship. That should never happen, and thanks to the richest man in the world, at least until the legal bills arrive, it may have happened for the last time.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley