The left is determined to bring down Elon Musk for championing free speech, but he’s fighting back — and throwing badly needed sunlight on his foes’ shady tactics.
Good for him. And Americans generally.
On Monday, the X owner filed the “thermonuclear” lawsuit he’d threatened against the left-leaning advocacy group Media Matters.
His suit charges the group with “maliciously” and misleadingly depicting major-company ads appearing on the platform next to pro-Nazi and white-supremacist posts “as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform.”
Media Matters stands by its “reporting,” but if the lawsuit’s charges are true (and they sure seem plausible), then this group has stooped to a new low: intentionally misleading companies to think the platform is so rife with ugly content that their ads are sure to appear near such posts.
Per the suit, Media Matters created its report by intentionally bypassing X’s safeguards against such posts, creating accounts that “exclusively followed” accounts owned by big-name advertisers plus “a small subset of users” who are “known to produce extreme, fringe content.”
It then “resorted to endlessly scrolling and refreshing” until it got the results it wanted: “controversial content next to X’s largest advertisers,” which it screenshotted and used in its “reporting” on X.
The group revealed none of this shady, behind-the-scenes book-cooking, but Musk and X have the tools to expose it — tools the public lacks.
Indeed, the average person often has no idea why they’ve been “canceled” or thrown in social-media prison, let alone how an activist group might distort what appears on social media.
Yet Musk has been pulling back the curtain on platforms’ underhanded tactics, as when he released the Twitter files.
That’s let Americans see how government officials collude with left-leaning social media to censor disfavored speech — such as when pre-Musk Twitter and Facebook squelched The Post’s scoop on Hunter Biden’s laptop to protect Joe Biden before the 2020 election.
The left has also been smearing Musk with weak charges of antisemitism, most recently over the (crudely made) point of his retweet that many liberal Jews have supported the wokeness now fueling division among Americans over Israel.
Whether or not Musk’s lawsuit prevails, he’s already proven enormously valuable in the fight for freedom and democracy.
Americans owe him their thanks.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
