The nonprofit Media Matters for America filed suit against X this week, accusing Elon Musk’s social media company of “harassment” and Musk of a “globetrotting litigation campaign against Media Matters.”
After Media Matters reported on X placing ads next to pro-Nazi content in 2023, X filed three lawsuits against the nonprofit accusing it of threatening the company’s relationships with advertisers. Media Matters now alleges that X breached its own Terms of Service by filing those suits in Texas, Ireland, and Singapore — claiming any complaints should have been brought to San Francisco, where X was headquartered at the time.
The media watchdog group says it has spent millions of dollars to defend itself in court, and is suing for damages. It’s also seeking a court order to stop X from initiating litigation in countries outside of the US or from pursuing its pending cases in Ireland and Singapore.
Media Matters now alleges that X breached its own Terms of Service
Media Matter’s complaint cites X’s own policy, which said that “all disputes related to these Terms or the Services will be brought solely in the federal or state courts located in San Francisco County, California, United States.”
X changed its terms of service last year, however, to send disputes to federal court in the Northern District of Texas, Reuters reports. Musk moved the company’s offices from California to Texas last year after taking control of Twitter and rebranding it as X. A federal judge in Texas, who owned Tesla stock, denied a motion last year to toss out X’s lawsuit against Media Matters there — saying it X “properly pled its claims” in the correct venue.
San Francisco, meanwhile, has been a more favorable arena for watchdog groups sued by X. A federal judge there dismissed a similar lawsuit X filed against the Center for Counting Digital Hate (CCDH). In that suit, X accused CCDH of launching “a scare campaign” that allegedly cost it “tens of millions of dollars” in lost ad revenue. “This case is about punishing the Defendants [CCDH] for their speech,” the judge wrote in his decision.
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge. The suit it filed against Media Matters in Texas claims the nonprofit “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.”
Media Matters stands by its analysis. “X brought these suits as punishment for Media Matters’ truthful reporting that ads appeared next to white-supremacist content on the X platform,” the organization says in the complaint filed Monday in a US District Court in San Francisco.