In a 2am tweet at Saturday morning, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk said that “the split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack against our company.”
Last week Media Matters published a report showing that ads on X were being displayed alongside pro-Nazi and antisemitic posts. As a result, large advertisers including Apple, Comcast, Disney, IBM, Lionsgate, NBC Universal, and Warner Brothers opted to halt their spending on the platform.
Musk himself also came under fire last week for saying that he agreed with a social media post that accused “Jewish communities” of pushing “hatred against whites.” In the same thread Musk criticized the Jewish non-profit advocacy group Anti-Defamation League claiming the group was pushing “de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind.”
Musk has previously threatened to sue the ADL for defamation, alleging that the group “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.”
According to Musk’s late-night tweet he sees the Media Matters story as “another attempt to undermine freedom of speech and mislead advertisers.” The post goes on to say “for speech to be truly free, we must also have the freedom to see or hear things that some people may consider objectionable.”
Musk says that company looked into the 9 posts that Media Matters said it did not believe should have been allowed on the platform and found that only one of the ads violated the company’s content policies.
In an earlier tweet Friday Musk also claimed “Many of the largest advertisers are the greatest oppressors of your right to free speech,” and he suggested users instead opt to pat $16 to avoid seeing ads in their timeline.
