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X sues watchdog group Media Matters after report on ads next to Nazi posts
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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How is it defamatory if it’s true?
You don't get to ask questions like that to a free speech absolutist.
This is the default law action from Musk these days. Also, a nonsensical law suite is enough to shut a big newspaper sometimes. The governing Liberal Democratic Party in Japan successfully silenced a news organization by starting a 1 billion yen (or some amount) nonsense law suit. Hell, they control the supreme court judges also.
Did you read the article? X is alleging that media matters had to manipulate their platform in order for it to generate these ads next to the hateful accounts. According to their records, those ads only appeared one time, for the user account associated with Media Matters. This supports their theory that manipulation was required.
I guess we'll have to wait for the court case to find out who's right. But immediately assuming the X lawsuit has no merits just because you don't like Elon Musk is a bit disingenuous.
Unless I'm missing it, nowhere in the article or elsewhere did they say that ads only appeared one time.
They said that ads were served for one particular account 50 times (and presumably have data to back that up but I'm not inclined to give them benefit of the doubt). And that media matters had scrolled/refreshed a bunch of times to see whose ads would be displayed. Which seems reasonable to me.
Then TwitX made some claim about "50 out of 50 billion ads served" or something, which is a disingenuous comparison. This was one example of a problem. No one claimed it was the only example, so why would anyone compare against all ads served anywhere?
I agree with your point in general, but I have a hard time applying it here. Unless the lawsuit alleges that MM hacked into Twitter or doctored the screenshots, then the core claim of the MM report "Twitter served ad Y next to post Z" is not under dispute. If the claim is that refreshing a page is malicious, then I don't think we need to wait to call the lawsuit malicious.
@communication
I agree that the core claim of the MM report is not under dispute. But take a look at their article now that you know the context around how those ads were generated.
https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/musk-endorses-antisemitic-conspiracy-theory-x-has-been-placing-ads-apple-bravo-ibm-oracle
I don't know if it's defamatory, but you have to agree that it comes off as a bit disingenuous based on the new info from X. Of course that info from X could be BS, which is why I said we'll have to wait for the court case to know for sure.
I mean, it's splitting hairs. While the proximity probably didn't help, I doubt the companies deciding to pull ads weren't like "sure, we don't mind hanging out in a nazi bar, just make sure not to seat us next to any nazis." I mean, some probably were, but there has been increasingly large amounts of pressure on these people and within like 24 hours of each other Elon endorses replacement theory and the MM story drops that Elon is running ads for nazis. There are only so many times you can make a dumb excuse. For lots of us, that was a long time ago. Even the capitalists are realizing now at least that he's bad for business.
@whofearsthenight
No doubt - the advertisers are 100% right to pull out. I was only answering the original commenter that asked how the MM report could be considered defamatory. I definitely didn't intend to come across as a Musk apologist.
Okay, that's a fair point. They left too many blanks for the reader to fill in, and some will assume the problem is more widespread than it is.
When I put my Social Scientist hat on, I don't think the methodology was totally unreasonable or obviously malicious, so X would have to strengthen their claims to convince me to wait for court. But you're right, MM should have done better.
Basically, Musk is alleging is that they claimed this was a common practice when it was, in fact, extremely rare.
In his tweet about this he said that out of 5.5 **billion ** ad impressions that day, less than 50 were objectionable according to Media Matter's criteria. In other words, there was a 1 in 100 million chance that a normal user would randomly see something like this.
For comparison, the following things have about a 1 in a million chance of happening (i.e. are 100 times more likely):
I just read the MM piece and it doesn't appear to make any specific claims about how frequently this might have happened, it merely says "We recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity, and IBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party on X." and that "X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content." which does indeed appear to be factual since it makes no claims about frequency, so I guess we'll see if the court is convinced that it was defamatory. It certainly seems to be the truth, but not the whole truth.
If it turns out they really DID have to create 100 million page views in order to find a single questionable ad placement, and they failed to mention that, you could make the case that they were intentionally trying to hurt his business.