X owner Elon Musk followed through on his threat to file a lawsuit against progressive media-monitoring nonprofit Media Matters which Musk believes is hurting business at his social-media platform.
The suit, filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Divison, alleges that Media Matters manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers’ posts on X “beside Neo-Nazi and white nationalist fringe content.”
X pointed Barron’s to a post from CEO Linda Yaccario when asked for comment. “If you know me, you know I’m committed to truth and fairness,” reads part of her tweet. “Not a single authentic user on X saw IBM’s, Comcast’s, or Oracle’s ads next to the content in Media Matters’ article.”
The complaint, which runs to 15 pages, explains how X believes Media Matters conducted its research to skew results. X believes that Media Matters’ study, published on Nov. 16 led advertisers including International Business Machines (ticker: IBM), Comcast’s (CMCSA) NBCUniversal, and Apple (AAPL) to suspend all advertising on the platform.
