Civil Liberties

Elon’s Censorial Lawsuit Against Media Matters Inspiring Many More People To Find ExTwitter Ads On Awful Content

from the elon-should-learn-about-the-streisand-effect dept

Mon, Nov 27th 2023 09:36am - Mike Masnick

We’ve already discussed the extremely censorial nature of ExTwitter’s lawsuit against Media Matters for accurately describing ads from major brands that appeared next to explicitly neoNazi content. The lawsuit outright admits that Media Matters did, in fact, see those ads next to that content. Its main complaint is that Elon is mad that he thinks they said that such ads regularly appear next to such content, when it only (according to him) rarely appears next to that content, which he admits the site mostly allows.

Of course, there are a few rather large problems with all of this. The first is that the lawsuit admits that what Media Matters observed and said is truthful. The second is that while Elon and his fans keep insisting that the problem is about how often those ads appear next to such content, Media Matters never made any such claim about how frequently such ads showed up, and as IBM noted in pulling its ads, it wants a zero tolerance policy on its ads showing up next to Nazi content, meaning that even if it’s true that only Media Matters employees saw that content, that’s still one too many people.

But there’s a bigger problem: in making a big deal out of this and filing one of the worst SLAPP suits I’ve ever seen, all while claiming that Media Matters “manipulated” things (even as the lawsuit admits that it did no such thing), it is only begging more people to go looking for ads appearing next to terrible content.

And they’re finding them. Easily.

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