We have long known that Media Matters for America is a sleazy outfit that exists in large part not to play in the marketplace of ideas but for the goal of driving conservatives out of that marketplace. That’s been its modus operandi in the past, in agitating for advertiser boycotts of figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson, whom Media Matters wants off the airwaves. Now, they’ve come after Elon Musk over the content-moderation policies of X (formerly Twitter). They appear to have picked on the wrong guy.
On Monday, Musk’s company filed suit against Media Matters and one of its writers, Eric Hananoki, in federal court in the Northern District of Texas. The suit alleges that the campaign by Media Matters and Hananoki to convince sponsors to abandon X involved misleading the advertisers about the possibility that users might see the sponsors’ ads running adjacent to posts with extremist content by neo-Nazis, white nationalists, antisemites, and the like. If X can prove what it alleges in its complaint, Media Matters may be in for the same sort of long, draining, expensive, and embarrassing battle that Fox News faced in the lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. And Musk, one of the world’s very richest men and a billionaire many times over, has the deep pockets and the motivation to keep at it for a very long time.
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