Ready To Rumble: Lawsuits Against Censorship-Industrial Complex Heat Up After Musk Kicks Open The Floodgates

We also learned about the aforementioned relationships between the censorship-industrial complex.

Let the games begin!

In August, Musk kicked off what has become several lawsuits against anti-free speech advocates, filing a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which X has accused of “actively working to assert false and misleading claims encouraging advertisers to pause investment on the platform.”

“X is a free public service funded largely by advertisers,” according to a Twitter blog entry. “Through the CCDH’s scare campaign and its ongoing pressure on brands to prevent the public’s access to free expression, the CCDH is actively working to prevent public dialogue.”

In October, Consortium News sued NewsGuard – a company which assigns scores to websites alleging to rank their credibility, for “acting jointly or in concert with the United States to coerce news organizations to alter viewpoints” regarding Ukraine, Russia and Syria, and has impsed a form of “censorship and repression of views” that diverge from US policies and those of its allies. The Biden administration was also named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

Then in November, X filed a lawsuit against Media Matters, after threatening to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against the left-leaning activist group “and all those who colluded” with them in a disinformation campaign and advertiser boycott against the social media platform.

The lawsuit, just filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas Fort Worth Division, alleges the organization’s tactics were manipulative and deceptive.

The suit claims:

Media Matters has opted for new tactics in its campaign to drive advertisers from X. Media Matters has manipulated the algorithms governing the user experience on X to bypass safeguards and create images of X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts adjacent to racist, incendiary content, leaving the false impression that these pairings are anything but what they actually are: manufactured, inorganic, and extraordinarily rare.

Media Matters executed this plot in multiple steps, as X’s internal investigations have revealed.

Following the lawsuit, Texas AG Ken Paxton announced an investigation into Media Matters for potential fraudulent activity.

Last week, the state of Texas, the Daily Wire and The Federalist sued the US State Department for conspiring with Newsguard to censor American media companies, and that the government agency funded censorship technology designed to bankrupt domestic media outlets which have disfavored political opinions. Read the 67-page complaint here.

Let’s get ready to Rumble…

On Nov. 30, streaming video platform Rumble sued two liberal activists who they allege worked in conjunction with Media Matters to lie about their source of ad revenues, thereby causing material damage to their reputation, as well as the destruction of more than $185 million from their market cap – despite the fact that Rumble notified them that they were incorrect.

Nandini Jammi (@nandoodles), Claire Atkin (@catthekin) – founders of “Check My Ads,” and nine anonymous individuals who work for Media Matters and Dewey Square, a “hyper-partisan public affairs agency.”

For example, Jammi was salivating over the opportunity to further demonetize X before Musk’s decision to reinstate Alex Jones to the platform.

And now, Rumble is suing…

Interestingly, Media Matters is accused of similar manipulation as the X lawsuit, namely that they manipulated Rumble’s platform to show Netflix ads next to a user-generated video expressing antisemitic views, which Media Matters staff ‘repeatedly refreshed,’ which caused ‘Rumble’s advertising system to serve different advertisements until Media Matters found one that it could use as fodder for its public pressure campaign.”

“As it turned out, the Media Matters employee engaging in this tactic was the only one to actually view the Netflix ad on the video.”

And so, as the lawsuits against the censorship complex begin to fly, one can’t help but feel that the tide may actually be turning – or at least, said censors will think twice before spouting defamatory claims about platforms that allow divergent opinions.