A federal judge in Texas has denied nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters’ request to dismiss a lawsuit by Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter, allowing the suit to head to trial next spring.
The November 2023 lawsuit alleged that a Media Matters report unfairly targeted X’s blue-chip advertisers, including Texas-based companies Oracle and AT&T, by using fabricated images showing ads next to neo-Nazi or other extremist content on the platform.
X alleges that the report was part of a deliberate “ideologically driven crusade” and caused advertisers to pull ads from its platform. Media Matters, X alleges, made it seem as if this was the average user experiences on the platform “in an effort to publicly portray X as a social media platform dominated by neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism, and thereby alienate major advertisers, publishers, and users away from the X platform, intending to harm it.”