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.”
The thing is that it looks like Musk is going to mount a technical defense. There’s likely to be an admission that there’s all kinds of Nazi crap on Twitter and that they allow it to roam free, within it’s own little echo chamber. The whole “it’s not what the average user experiences” tells me is that what they’re going to do is cover the keywords that unlock the Nazi echo chamber and how that sequence of required words aren’t in some top 5,000 search terms on the site.
I’m pretty sure the entire point will be to sow some distrust on Media Matter’s manner by which they got those screenshots. Basically an argument of “Well, yeah, if you search Nazi 100,000 times and then Apple 100,000 times, we’re going to absolutely show you Nazi + Apple stuff. But the number of users who have that as their search history, we here at Twitter, can count on one hand.”
The idea is to not deny that it is possible to get Nazi + Apple, but to indicate that the chances of getting it are so rare that Media Matters had to know that their research was contrived. I don’t think they’re going to deny one ounce of what Media Matters presents to the court, I think what they’re going to try and do is shift what the underlying question is on the matter. Basically, shifting it to “this happens to rarely that you just have to go out of your way to get it to happen.”
Media Matters will need to keep focus on their broader topic. “X admits that such a combination can happen, they indicate that it is super rare, but there is no way that X could have calculated every permutation. Because of that, the arguments of Media Matter stand firm in that such CAN absolutely happen and X has no idea the frequency of it.”
And the fact that X has filed in a very friendly to them courtroom, it’s likely that the court is going to entertain the more technical merits of the case rather than the broad questions. It’ll absolutely put Media Matters in a very hard position.
First rule of any kind of litigation. Don’t ever say never. Law is black and white but the people who enforce it and judge it are still fleshy emotion pods.
Oh yeah, he’s absolutely doing that.
Yeah, they signaled that’s what they’re going to argue but I don’t think it matters. That’s the standard way of doing that kind of research.
Lining up with any given ad is going to be a function of the number of buys for that ad and the number of locations on a page it could be shown on. That, times the number of users will give you the ability to estimate how many times that happens.
Not having the source code or the business rules for ad picking, the only way to simulate the experiences of millions of daily users is to load the pages over and over again and see what it produces.
IBM and Apple know pretty well how Internet advertising works. They were concerned enough to pull their spends because they were guaranteed this wouldn’t happen, and then it did. It’s really as easy as putting a flag like
racist=trueon the ad, then having the advertisers contract allow them to opt out of racist ads.In fact, it’s so simple and such a solved problem that the only reason it wouldn’t be working is if Elon fired the staff that oversees trust and safety and signals that it’s not a concern of twitter’s.
Which he did.
Even if he managed to hand pick his judge, he will lose on appeal. This is a SLAPP with a chilling effect, and I’ve done research on network effects using internet searches as part of the data set, and I can tell you that they followed accepted academic practice.
Musk’s sole argument will be that they didn’t say how often it happened out of how many attempts, but the breadth and variety of the documented instances shows it’s not uncommon when you’re talking about millions of daily users.
Either he knows he’s going to lose and is just doing this to get his narrative into headlines, or he’s got full blown narcissistic rage.
And I don’t disagree with you one bit there. But Texas’ anti-SLAPP law is the Texas Citizens Participation Act and it used to be one of the strongest in the country. In 2019, it was modified by the Texas Assembly to introduce a lot of gray area and weaken it considerably.
So I don’t disagree with the assertion that this is absolutely frivolous. But Texas’ current laws on the book are likely to give Musk enough room to avoid challenges on that aspect.
Oh no doubt, that’s the point. To sow doubt on that whole process.
Oh yeah, the notion that they’re indicating that Apple pulled their revenue because of “THIS REPORT” is just them grasping. But Musk is absolutely banking that IBM and Apple won’t file brief with the Judge to provide more motivation to stick to the broad questions put forward by Media Matters. Business wise, this case isn’t bringing dollars back to the platform, it is just being vindictive. Musk had his feels hurt and now he wants to hurt something else.
I’m going to guess that one. Just the way Musk’s been talking about this case, it feels like this one got deep under his skin.