Elon Musk had promised to go full scorched-earth against Media Matters in late 2023 for the non-profit's purportedly underhanded tactics to try to paint X as a platform that was rife with antisemitic content. Now, that "thermonuclear lawsuit" that X had filed shortly thereafter is finally heading for a high-profile trial.
As a refresher, in late 2023, a number of big-ticket advertisers, including Apple, Disney, Comcast, IBM, etc. had halted their advertisements on the X platform after Media Matters showed that some anti-Semitic content was found displayed adjacent to IBM's adverts.
Elon Musk responded to the resulting growing wave of boycotts by lobbing a lawsuit against Media Matters, alleging malfeasance. According to X's internal investigations, Media Matters curated a feed that consisted of accounts that regularly published "extreme, fringe content" and those belonging to a number of big-ticket advertisers. Thereafter, it resorted to numerous refreshes of that feed to achieve its desired results:
"[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."
For its part, Media Matters has consistently maintained that Elon Musk's lawsuit was "frivolous" in nature and that it was intended to "bully X’s critics into silence."
This brings us to today when the U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled against Media Matter's petition to dismiss X's lawsuit by noting that the plaintiff "has properly pled its claims," and allowed the upcoming court battle to proceed.
Today's development comes as the simmering dispute between Elon Musk and some of X's biggest advertisers continues unabated. In the past, Musk has gone so far as to use an expletive to express his frustration with the boycotting advertisers.
