A federal judge in Texas has denied nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters’ request to dismiss a lawsuit by Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter, allowing the suit to head to trial next spring.
The November 2023 lawsuit alleged that a Media Matters report unfairly targeted X’s blue-chip advertisers, including Texas-based companies Oracle and AT&T, by using fabricated images showing ads next to neo-Nazi or other extremist content on the platform.
X alleges that the report was part of a deliberate “ideologically driven crusade” and caused advertisers to pull ads from its platform. Media Matters, X alleges, made it seem as if this was the average user experiences on the platform “in an effort to publicly portray X as a social media platform dominated by neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism, and thereby alienate major advertisers, publishers, and users away from the X platform, intending to harm it.”
SpaceX and Tesla CEO, and owner of X, Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference in Paris in 2023. Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters will go to trial on April 7 of next year.
Chesnot/Getty Images
In March, Media Matters asked the judge to throw out the suit, filing a motion to dismiss on the legal basis of lack of personal jurisdiction, improper venue and failure to state a claim.
But in a new order Thursday, Judge Reed O’Connor denied the motion, stating X “has properly pled its claims.”
And with Texas-based advertisers named in the suit, O’Connor said that X “sufficiently alleges a substantial part of the events occurred within the Northern District of Texas.”
The lawsuit, which also names as defendants two Media Matters staff members, including President Angelo Carusone, is scheduled to go to trial on April 7 of next year.
Newsweek contacted X and Media Matters via email for comment outside of normal business hours on Friday.
Musk concluded his purchase of Twitter in October 2022, officially renaming the social media site X in July the following year.
O’Connor was previously assigned to Musk’s antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers, but later recused himself.
Following X’s original filing of the lawsuit, Media Matters laid off a dozen staff members.
Carusone told Newsweek in May that the nonprofit needed “to be extremely intentional about how we allocate resources in order to stay effective.”
