Elon Musk exposes Media Matters as an ideological shakedown operation

Elon Musk is suing Media Matters, claiming it fabricated appearances of pro-Nazi content near ads from major companies. via REUTERS

Elon Musk just opened a new front in the war for free speech in a Fort Worth federal court.

There, his X launched a legal missile against Media Matters for America, the longtime left-wing speech assassin and smear merchant that masquerades as a “progressive research and information center.”

X alleges the nonprofit — founded by Democratic hatchet man David Brock, funded by the likes of progressive billionaire George Soros and fixated on canceling conservative voices such as the late Rush Limbaugh and hosts on Fox News — has now trained its sights on obliterating the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Media Matters sought to defame and damage the platform by executing the dirtiest of dirty tricks.

According to X’s suit: “Looking to portray X’s social networking platform as being dominated by ‘white nationalist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,’ 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.”

Media Matters apparently manipulated X’s algorithms to cook up the desired guilt by association.

According to X’s investigation, the scheme worked like this: First, the tax-exempt left-wing attack dog created an account to follow exclusively “fringe” X users on the one hand and X’s biggest paid advertisers — major corporations like Apple, Comcast and IBM — on the other.

Then the nonprofit scrolled and refreshed the inauthentic accounts’ feed at rates generating 13 to 15 times more ads per hour than would be seen by the average authentic Xer, until it could get pairings of pernicious content next to paid ads.

In a single instance, per X, one of the platform’s 500 million users other than Media Matters saw a pairing Media Matters produced. In most cases, the fake Media Matters account was the only one in the world to render a poisonous pairing. Publications have failed to replicate its results.

Having engineered the odious outcomes, Media Matters then publicized them as part of a “strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.,” the lawsuit says.

The gambit worked — a gambit, it’s worth noting, that emanates from the left, which has proven overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Nazis of Hamas and hostile to its would-be Jewish vanquishers in Israel.

After Media Matters circulated its contrived “findings” on its website, X says every company featured in the report but Oracle — including Apple, Comcast, IBM and NBCUniversal — pulled its ads from the platform.

Media Matters is not alone in pressuring major corporations into pulling advertising from websites it dislikes.

There is a cottage industry in “brand safety,” something of a protection racket whereby corporations, and/or their ad agencies, pay third parties to tell them where not to advertise so they can avoid the wrath of leftist activists.

Entities such as NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index are pioneers in this censorship-as-a-service business. They effectively blacklist conservative and other dissenting outlets by subjectively grading them on the extent to which they traffic in “mis- and dis-information.”

RealClearInvestigations, where I am editor at large, recently reported on NewsGuard’s scrutiny of our unmasking of the so-called whistleblower in the first Donald Trump impeachment — something outlets such as The New York Times refused to do. When challenged on its criticism, NewsGuard went silent.

The Times, a key promoter of the Russiagate hoax, gets a perfect 100% score from NewsGuard. RCI, which pursues stories and angles the likes of the Times can’t or won’t, sits at 80%.

Seeing low grades tarnishes the reputations of outlets and causes would-be advertisers to pull back, drying up essential revenue streams.

Media Matters takes this “brand safety” model and puts it on steroids. Since X generates the vast majority of its revenue from paid advertisements, its crusade clearly aims to kill the business.

Why? Because under Musk’s ownership, X is the one major platform to strike back at the censorship-industrial complex and attempt to restore at least some semblance of free and open discourse.

That matters because as Missouri v. Biden, the Twitter Files and congressional oversight have revealed, government agencies have pressured social-media platforms into information warfare — tools for surveilling and censoring disfavored speech.

The purpose is for authorities to monopolize the narrative to maintain power.

The only response for those who wish to live in a free society is to defund and dismantle this complex, requiring both hard-hitting legislation and litigation — fighting fire with fire, as Musk’s X is doing with Media Matters.