At this point it is pretty clear that X/Twitter is profiting from Hamas propaganda and this is all part of Musk's business strategy to make money off the most extreme virulent posts. Democrats accuse X of profiting from Hamas propaganda https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/21/tech/democrats-accuse-x-elon-musk-hamas-propaganda/index.html A group of House Democrats has accused X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, of profiting from Hamas propaganda and misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war after reports by independent researchers found numerous accounts glorifying the US-sanctioned terror group. More than two dozen US lawmakers signed the letter dated Tuesday addressed to X owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino. Citing analyses by groups including the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, NewsGuard and the Tech Transparency Project, Tuesday’s letter said lawmakers were “outraged by the clear indicators that X is profiting from the spread of Hamas’s terrorist propaganda — both through monthly subscription fees collected from some propaganda spreaders, and through ads displayed in replies to posts by both Premium and regular accounts.” One of the reports in question, published last month, claimed to have identified examples of paid X subscribers sharing videos bearing Hamas iconography and depicting violent or gruesome images. Another report claimed to have identified dozens of paid X subscriber accounts promoting “false or unsubstantiated narratives relating to the war” and that posts spreading the misinformation had been viewed at least 100 million times globally. “Given X’s major cuts to content moderation staff over the last year, it appears that X has willfully permitted, and benefited from, the illegal spread of terrorist propaganda,” wrote the group, led by Reps. Adam Schiff of California, Daniel Goldman of New York and Jamie Raskin of Maryland. “Such behavior from one of the world’s most widely used social media platforms is wholly unacceptable.” X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawmakers’ accusations. On Tuesday, Musk abruptly announced that X would be donating “all revenue from advertising & subscriptions associated with the war in Gaza to hospitals in Israel and the Red Cross/Crescent in Gaza.” But it was unclear what content he was referring to and whether the announcement was directly related to the lawmakers’ letter. X Head of Business Operations Joe Benarroch declined to clarify the company’s plans beyond saying the donation would be “a sizeable amount.” The pressure from House Democrats comes amid a wider blowback to X over extremist content on the platform, in some cases amplified directly by Musk himself. In recent days, X has suffered a notable exodus of high-profile advertisers following Musk’s public embrace of an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular with White supremacists and a report by Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog group, that said major brands’ advertisements appeared beside pro-Nazi content. Musk sued Media Matters on Monday, accusing it of distorting the likelihood that ads may be shown against extremist material. But some legal critics have cast doubt on the complaint, calling it “weak” and “bogus” in the face of the First Amendment. Tuesday’s letter also highlights the mounting public scrutiny of Yaccarino, who until now has sought to position herself as a cheery counterweight to Musk’s flirtation with far-right extremism. The letter calls for Yaccarino and Musk to answer by December 1 to allegations that X has amplified terrorist propaganda in violation of its own policies. It comes a day after the Senate Judiciary Committee said it had enlisted the US Marshals Service, in a rare move, to serve Yaccarino with a subpoena personally, compelling her to testify at a December 6 hearing on children’s online safety. In a release, the committee said it was forced to take that extraordinary measure after X declined to accept the subpoena on Yaccarino’s behalf, in a “remarkable departure from typical practice.”
Here is a glimpse of the future... Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against Media Matters Risks Sending Twitter Into a ‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’ https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/el...twitter-into-a-rapid-unscheduled-disassembly/ Elon Musk's latest lawsuit set to backfire spectacularly Elon Musk's new lawsuit against a media watchdog has been largely written off by legal experts as a clumsy attempt to bully a critic into silence, but if the complaint isn't dismissed in court it could open the X boss and his company up to potentially ruinous scrutiny. https://www.rawstory.com/media-matters-elon-musk/
We will watch and see. It is a very bad idea to piss off the richest man in the world. I think this BS organization will have a hard time dealing with the lawsuit.
Elon Musk exposes Media Matters as an ideological shakedown operation https://nypost.com/2023/11/22/opini...eration/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email Elon Musk just opened a new front in the war for free speech in a Fort Worth federal court. There, his X launched a legal missile against Media Matters for America, the longtime left-wing speech assassin and smear merchant that masquerades as a “progressive research and information center.” X alleges the nonprofit — founded by Democratic hatchet man David Brock, funded by the likes of progressive billionaire George Soros and fixated on canceling conservative voices such as the late Rush Limbaugh and hosts on Fox News — has trained its sights on obliterating the platform formerly known as Twitter. Media Matters sought to defame and damage the platform by executing the dirtiest of dirty tricks. According to X’s suit: “Looking to portray X’s social networking platform as being dominated by ‘white nationalist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,’ Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers’ posts on X Corp.’s social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform.” Media Matters apparently manipulated X’s algorithms to cook up the desired guilt by association. According to X’s investigation, the scheme worked like this: First, the tax-exempt left-wing attack dog created an account to follow exclusively “fringe” X users on the one hand and X’s biggest paid advertisers — major corporations like Apple, Comcast and IBM — on the other. Then the nonprofit scrolled and refreshed the inauthentic accounts’ feed at rates generating 13 to 15 times more ads per hour than would be seen by the average authentic Xer, until it could get pairings of pernicious content next to paid ads. In a single instance, per X, one of the platform’s 500 million users other than Media Matters saw a pairing Media Matters produced. In most cases, the fake Media Matters account was the only one in the world to render a poisonous pairing. Publications have failed to replicate its results. Having engineered the odious outcomes, Media Matters then publicized them as part of a “strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.,” the lawsuit says. The gambit worked — a gambit, it’s worth noting, that emanates from the left, which has proven overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Nazis of Hamas and hostile to its would-be Jewish vanquishers in Israel. After Media Matters circulated its contrived “findings” on its website, X says, every company featured in the report but Oracle — including Apple, Comcast, IBM and NBCUniversal — pulled its ads from the platform.
I certainly hope that Elon is stupid enough to proceed to the discovery point in his lawsuit against Media Matters -- this would force X/Twitter to turn over all of their internal material (email, chat, data, etc.) which would demonstrate they knew they were placing advertising from major advertisers next to neo-Nazi posts. After thousands of Twitter users posted screen shots of ads from major advertisers next to neo-Nazi posts in their own feeds or search results -- X/Twitter really has no defense in court, since this user experience is pervasive. Twitter tried to shut down searches on some "antisemitic" terms which pulled up results from neo-Nazis with nearby advertising. This response by Musk failed on two levels. First it is simple to just move on to new/different hashtags/terms that provide the same results. Second, Musk is cutting down the visibility of some of the most prolific accounts (which happen to be neo-Nazi accounts) on his website which provided X/Twitter with revenue. At this point Musk's X/Twitter is nothing more than a neo-Nazi haven and chatroom.