Elon Musk’s antisemitic comments have pushed X advertisers over the edge
Elon Musk’s antisemitic comments have pushed X advertisers over the edge
The social network once known as Twitter is facing a new exodus thanks to the behaviour of its mercurial owner – and it may not recover, reports Io Dodds
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...launched what he called a "thermonuclear lawsuit" against Media Matters, which accused it of artificially manipulating the social network’s algorithms to achieve the contentious juxtapositions (while admitting that they had in fact occurred).
This is my favorite part of this whole story.
It's like the narcissist's prayer directly translated into a lawsuit.
Even Media Matters admitted that the circumstances under which the antisemitic content appeared next to the named advertisers would be very hard to replicate - they basically followed only the advertisers and the antisemitic accounts to see how long it would take to link the two, but still, it's not like they hid what they were doing. It's not quite the gotcha that Media Matters held it out to be, but is still only a factual account - they were able to get hateful content to show up beside an advertisers name, and that's why I'm sure X gets their ass handed to them in this lawsuit they've filed. It wasn't fraudulent, or in bad faith, it was simply an exposition of what the platform can do.
I saw in another article too that after they admitted that it had in fact happened, they claimed that the problem was that Media Matters had made it seem to be more common than it in fact was.
The reality of course is that MM just reported that it had happened. And used-to-be-twitter has already admitted that much.
So yeah - they're going to get their asses handed to them in this lawsuit.
The problem though is that we're now in a timeline in which the fascism-adjacent demagogues who support Musk are so invested in their narrative that they're going to view the failure of the lawsuit as some sort of contrarian proof that it was justified. To them, it's not going to fail because MM's accusation was in fact legitimate, but because "blah blah blah deep state something something great replacement yadda yadda woke mob."
You're right, and also, fuck this timeline.