Elon’s Censorial Lawsuit Against Media Matters Inspiring Many More People To Find ExTwitter Ads On Awful Content

We've already discussed the extremely censorial nature of ExTwitter's lawsuit against Media Matters for accurately describing ads from major brands that appeared next to explicitly neoNazi content. The lawsuit outright admits that Media Matters did, in fact, see those ads next to that content. Its main complaint is that Elon is mad that he thinks they said that such ads regularly appear next to such content, when it only (according to him) rarely appears next to that content, which he admits the site mostly allows.

Of course, there are a few rather large problems with all of this. The first is that the lawsuit admits that what Media Matters observed and said is truthful. The second is that while Elon and his fans keep insisting that the problem is about how often those ads appear next to such content, Media Matters never made any such claim about how frequently such ads showed up, and as IBM noted in pulling its ads, it wants a zero tolerance policy on its ads showing up next to Nazi content, meaning that even if it's true that only Media Matters employees saw that content, that's still one too many people.

But there's a bigger problem: in making a big deal out of this and filing one of the worst SLAPP suits I've ever seen, all while claiming that Media Matters manipulated" things (even as the lawsuit admits that it did no such thing), it is only begging more people to go looking for ads appearing next to terrible content.

And they're finding them. Easily.

As the DailyDot pointed out, a bunch of users started looking around and found that ads were being served next to the tag #HeilHitler and killjews" among other neo-Nazi content and accounts. Avi Bueno kicked things off, noting that he didn't need to do any of the things the lawsuit accuses Media Matters of doing:

Of course, lots of others found similar things, again without any sort of manipulation," and, if anything, showing that it was possible to see big name brands show up in ads next to vile content in a manner that is even easier to find than Media Matters ever implied.

Some users started calling for the #ElonHitlerChallenge, asking users to search the hashtag #heilhitler and screenshot that ads they found:

Bizarrely, a bunch of people found that if you searched that hashtag, ExTwitter recommended you follow the fast food chain Jack in the Box.

On Sunday evening I tested this, and it's true that if you do a search on #heilhitler, and then see who are the people" it recommends you follow, it lists two authenticated accounts: Jack in the Box and Linda Yaccarino, and then a bunch of accounts with HeilHitler" either in their username or display name. Cool cool.

Meanwhile, if Musk thought that his SLAPP suits against the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters were somehow going to stop organizations from looking to see if big time company ads are showing up next to questionable content, he seems to have predicted poorly.

A few days after the lawsuit against Media Matters, NewsGuard released a report looking at ads that appeared below 30 viral tweets that contained false or egregiously misleading information" regarding the Israeli/Hamas conflict. And, well, it's not good news for companies that believe in trying to avoid having their ads appear next to nonsense.

These 30 viral tweets were posted by ten of X's worst purveyors of Israel-Hamas war-related misinformation; these accounts have previously been identified by NewsGuard as repeat spreaders of misinformation about the conflict. These 30 tweets have cumulatively reached an audience of over 92 million viewers, according to X data. On average, each tweet was seen by 3 million people.

A list of the 30 tweets and the 10 accounts used in NewsGuard's analysis is available here.

The 30 tweets advanced some of the most egregious false ormisleading claims about the war, which NewsGuard had previously debunked in its Misinformation Fingerprints database of the most significant false and misleading claims spreading online. These include that the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel was a false flag" and that CNN staged footage of an October 2023 rocket attack on a news crew in Israel. Half of the tweets (15) were flagged with a fact-check by Community Notes, X's crowd-source fact-checking feature, which under the X policy would have made them ineligible for advertising revenue. However, the other half did not feature a Community Note. Ads for major brands, such as Pizza Hut, Airbnb, Microsoft, Paramount, and Oracle, were found by NewsGuard on posts with and without a Community Note (more on this below).

In total, NewsGuard analysts cumulatively identified 200 ads from 86 major brands, nonprofits, educational institutions, and governments that appeared in the feeds below 24 of the 30 tweets containing false or egregiously misleading claims about the Israel-Hamas war. The other six tweets did not feature advertisements.

As NewsGuard notes, the accounts in question appear to pass the threshold to make money from the ads on their posts:

It is worth noting that to be eligible for X's ad revenue sharing, account holders must meet three specific criteria: they must be subscribers to X Premium ($8 per month), have garnered at least five million organic impressions across their posts in the past three months, and have a minimum of 500 followers. Each of the 10 super-spreader accounts NewsGuard analyzed appears to fit those criteria.

Hell, NewsGuard even found that the FBI is paying for ads on ExTwitter, and they're showing up next to nonsense:

For example, NewsGuard found an ad for the FBI on a Nov. 9, 2023, post from Jackson Hinkle that claimed a video showed an Israeli military helicopter firing on its own citizens. The post did not contain a Community Note and had been viewed more than 1.7 million times as of Nov. 20.

This seems especially noteworthy given the false Twitter Files claim (promoted by Elon Musk) that any time the FBI gives a company money, it's for censorship." In that case, the FBI reimbursed Twitter for information lookups, which is required under the law.

Either way, good job, Elon, in filing the world's worst SLAPP suit against Media Matters, and insisting that their report about big name brands appearing next to awful content was manipulated," you've made sure that lots of people tested that claim, and found that it was quite easy to see big brand ads next to terrible content.