The owner of Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX said late last year that he would do everything he could against the nonprofit, and that he would soon see the results in court.

Elon Musk filed the lawsuit in late 2023 because he said Media Matters was using below-the-belt tactics to paint Twitter as a platform full of anti-Semitic content. He promised a “thermonuclear” lawsuit at the time, and it’s about to happen. He promised this because many major advertisers (such as Apple, Disney, Comcast, and IBM) stopped advertising on the platform after the Media Matters report that showed anti-Semitic content alongside IBM’s ads.

Musk has responded to the growing wave of boycotts by filing a lawsuit against Media Matters, alleging malpractice. According to Twitter’s internal investigation, Media Matters curated a feed consisting of accounts that regularly published extremist content, as well as accounts belonging to a number of high-profile advertisers. It then updated the feed multiple times to achieve the desired results:

“[Media Matters] resorted to endlessly scrolling and refreshing its unrepresentative, hand-picked feed, generating between 13 and 15 times more ads per hour than the average Twitter user sees, repeating this inauthentic activity until it finally obtained pages containing the desired result: controversial content next to paid posts from Twitter’s largest advertisers,” the site said.

All Media Matters said was that Musk’s lawsuit was frivolous and intended to silence critics of the social networking site. The nonprofit attempted to whitewash the lawsuit in court, but Judge Reed O’Connor ruled against it, saying the plaintiff had adequately stated its claims and allowed the upcoming court battle to proceed.

Considering that Musk had previously used profanity to express his frustration with the boycotting advertisers, it is interesting to note… and who knows how this will play out.

Source: WCCFTech, CNBC