Media Matters is gonna find out the hard way

[clusterchuck]

They picked a fight with the wrong guy.

[Chester Cheesewright]

Oh. no

Did they pick on Elon now?

Have they no sense of shame?

[clusterchuck]

NEW: An X executive discloses that the content highlighted in Media Matters' article constituted a mere 50 out of 5,500,000,000 ad impressions served throughout the entire day.

In reality, virtually no authentic users encountered these ads juxtaposed with the mentioned content—except for Media Matters' employees, who intentionally exploited the system to locate such material.

How did Media Matters achieve this?

They created three new accounts, each following only a small number of accounts posting objectionable material.

By relentlessly refreshing their timeline—13 times more frequently than an average user—they were able to capture screenshots of major corporate advertisements alongside the targeted content.

This revelation exposes Media Matters' calculated strategy: generating these screenshots as leverage to compel major advertisers to withdraw their ads from X.

Deceptive, manipulative, and evil?

[thelionofthenorth]

Elon is just pissked that his 40 billion investment has burned down like a tallow dip, and republican-like, he’s looking for someone beside himself to blame.

[stuporstitionist]

1) Big advertisers wouldn't flee because of one example (even a contrived one). The problem has to be bigger than X and their stooges pretend it is.

2) Musk is making antisemitic posts.

Advertisers generally don't like to be associated with Nazis and bigots.

I'll bet their biggest advertiser now is Cheech and Chong edibles.

[zombielust4power]

1) Big advertisers wouldn't flee because of one example (even a contrived one). The problem has to be bigger than X and their stooges pretend it is.

2) Musk is making antisemitic posts.

Advertisers generally don't like to be associated with Nazis and bigots.

I'll bet their biggest advertiser now is Cheech and Chong edibles.

Gold investment

[Chester Cheesewright]

NEW: An X executive discloses that the content highlighted in Media Matters' article constituted a mere 50 out of 5,500,000,000 ad impressions served throughout the entire day.

In reality, virtually no authentic users encountered these ads juxtaposed with the mentioned content—except for Media Matters' employees, who intentionally exploited the system to locate such material.

How did Media Matters achieve this?

They created three new accounts, each following only a small number of accounts posting objectionable material.

By relentlessly refreshing their timeline—13 times more frequently than an average user—they were able to capture screenshots of major corporate advertisements alongside the targeted content.

This revelation exposes Media Matters' calculated strategy: generating these screenshots as leverage to compel major advertisers to withdraw their ads from X.

Deceptive, manipulative, and evil?

► You've no idea what Media Matters did, unless you found it in an odd tweet from a total stranger

[clusterchuck]

Case 4:23-cv-01175-P Document 1 Filed 11/20/23

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS
FORT WORTH DIVISION

COMPLAINT
1. Defendant Media Matters for America (“Media Matters”) is a self-proclaimed
media watchdog that decided it would not let the truth get in the way of a story it wanted to publish
about X Corp. 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 designed
both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and
destroy X Corp.
2. Plaintiff X Corp. operates the X social media platform with over 500 million active
monthly users. X facilitates free expression and open discourse by enabling its users to create and
share their own content and to message and comment on other users’ posts. These posts appear
sequentially to users in “feeds,” which occasionally include paid advertisements—the
overwhelming source of X Corp.’s revenue.
3. Users shape their own experiences on X. Users curate the content on their own
feeds by choosing to “follow” other users, thereby determining which posts are presented to them.
Most users are served a variety of content based on an algorithm that takes account of who that
user follows and what that user engages with. But X also provides its users the option to forgo
algorithmically suggested posts altogether, thereby enabling a user to view only the content that
user chooses to view.
4. As the most prominent online platform dedicated to hosting free speech, X and its
predecessor Twitter have long been the target of Media Matters. In just the last year, Media Matters
has published a series of articles threatening X’s relationships with massive multinational
advertisers and global publishers, including Amazon, eBay, Major League Baseball, New York
Times Co., Samsung, Sports Illustrated, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Office Depot, Nokia,
Dish, Bayer, Tyson Foods, Honeywell, Discovery, FanDuel, Thermo Fisher, National Women’s
Soccer League, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Atlanta Falcons, Manchester City, DraftKings,
FanDuel, T-Mobile, and The Athletic.1
5. This November alone Media Matters released over twenty articles (and counting)
disparaging both X Corp. and Elon Musk—a blatant smear campaign.
6. For the last several years, Media Matters has falsely portrayed Twitter, now X, as a
risky, unsafe platform for advertisers. Contrary to these efforts, 99% of X’s measured ad placement
in 2023 has appeared adjacent to content scoring above the Global Alliance for Responsible
Media’s brand safety floor.
7. Undeterred by the truth, Media Matters has opted for new tactics in its campaign to
drive advertisers from X. Media Matters has manipulated the algorithms governing the user
experience on X to bypass safeguards and create images of X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts
adjacent to racist, incendiary content, leaving the false impression that these pairings are anything
but what they actually are: manufactured, inorganic, and extraordinarily rare.
8. Media Matters executed this plot in multiple steps, as X’s internal investigations
have revealed. First, Media Matters accessed accounts that had been active for at least 30 days,
bypassing X’s ad filter for new users. Media Matters then exclusively followed a small subset of
users consisting entirely of accounts in one of two categories: those known to produce extreme,
fringe content, and accounts owned by X’s big-name advertisers. The end result was a feed
precision-designed by Media Matters for a single purpose: to produce side-by-side ad/content
placements that it could screenshot in an effort to alienate advertisers.
9. But this activity still was not enough to create the pairings of advertisements and
content that Media Matters aimed to produce.
10. Media Matters therefore resorted to endlessly scrolling and refreshing its
unrepresentative, hand-selected feed, generating between 13 and 15 times more advertisements
per hour than viewed by the average X user repeating this inauthentic activity until it finally
received pages containing the result it wanted: controversial content next to X’s largest advertisers’
paid posts.
11. Media Matters omitted mentioning any of this in a report published on November
16, 2023 that displayed instances Media Matters “found” on X of advertisers’ paid posts featured
next to Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist content. Nor did Media Matters otherwise provide any
context regarding the forced, inauthentic nature and extraordinary rarity of these pairings.
12. However, relying on the specious narrative propagated by Media Matters, the
advertisers targeted took these pairings to be anything but rare and inorganic, with all but one of
the companies featured in the Media Matters piece withdrawing all ads from X, including Apple,
Comcast, NBCUniversal, and IBM—some of X’s largest advertisers. Indeed, in pulling all
advertising from X in response to this intentionally deceptive report, IBM called the pairings an
“entirely unacceptable situation.”2 Only Oracle did not withdraw its ads.

The rest:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap ... .1.0_1.pdf

[clusterchuck]

Momentum

[stuporstitionist]

The king of free speech is suing a media company. Hilarious.