Ready to Rumble: Lawsuits Against Censorship-Industrial Complex Heat up After Musk Kicks Open the Floodgates
It took the richest man in the world to begin dismantling the censorship-industrial complex; a tightly connected network of government agencies, think tanks, private media platforms, and activist organizations whose goal is to censor, control, and bankrupt free speech platforms under the guise of battling ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’ that run counter to prevailing establishment narratives.
One of these entities, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, is a dark money organization run by an alleged former British intelligence operative.
We know all this because just over a year ago, X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk disseminated the “Twitter Files” to a small group of independent journalists, from which we learned that the Biden administration collaborated with Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, ban Donald Trump, and that the FBI essentially had its entire arm up Twitter’s ass in order to shape and control narratives.
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.
Following the lawsuit, Texas AG Ken Paxton announced an investigation into Media Matters for potential fraudulent activity.
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.
