the complaint filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas said.

Congrats To Elon Musk: I Didn’t Think You Had It In You To File A Lawsuit This Stupid. But, You Crazy Bastard, You Did It!

from the to-save-speech-we-need-to-censor-speech dept

Tue, Nov 21st 2023 09:27am - Mike Masnick

So, yesterday we covered Elon Musk’s ridiculous censorial threat to sue Media Matters “the split second the court opens on Monday.” Of course, as we noted, you can file lawsuits 24/7. And yet, as the courts opened on Monday, there was nothing. As mentioned in the original post, I was away from internet access for most of Monday, and when I finally got back online I was told there was still no lawsuit.

But, then, on Monday evening, the lawsuit finally came, and it was glorious. Gloriously stupid.

Honestly, this feels like what you get when you have a rich but legally ignorant dude who announces on a Friday that there will be a lawsuit on Monday and finally finds some terrible lawyers who are actually willing to file something just to live up to that promise.

It’s not a good lawsuit. It’s barely even a lawsuit at all. ... Let’s start at the top.

{snip}

From the comments:

Matt Waters November 21, 2023 at 6:23 pm

Re:
The probable one who wrote it clerked for Scalia and was {Solicitor} General of Texas.

https://fedsoc.org/contributors/judd-stone

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

from the elon-should-learn-about-the-streisand-effect dept

Mon, Nov 27th 2023 09:36am - Mike Masnick

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.

{snip}