A black and white image of Elon Musk stands against a background of falling megaphones. Some of the megaphones are crossed out, symbolizing selective censorship.
Musk image by U.S. Air Force / Trevor Cokley on Wikimedia Commons. Background by Ave Calvar on Unsplash

As billionaire tech entrepreneur and newly anointed Trump advisor Elon Musk’s star rises in conservative politics, free speech advocates warn that recent lawsuits brought by Musk’s social media company, X Corp., have the potential to stifle criticism of Musk and his companies.

The mere threat of more such lawsuits, advocates warn, could create a chilling effect, leading to self-censorship and fear among watchdog efforts across the internet.

“Within 24 hours of Musk taking ownership, the platform was inundated with hate and disinformation.”

In 2023, X Corp. sued Media Matters for America, a left-leaning nonprofit watchdog group dedicated to exposing right-wing misinformation and hate speech in mainstream media, over a November 2023 report by the group claiming X had been placing ads for major media companies “next to pro-Nazi content.”

The report included a series of screenshots of advertisements on X next to social media posts about Nazism and Hitler. Almost immediately, major advertisers started fleeing the platform.

In an open letter to X’s biggest advertisers, Media Matters and dozens of other groups warned advertisers that the changes Musk made to the platform were ushering in a flood of hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation and urged the companies to reconsider placing ads on the platform. As the groups wrote:

Within 24 hours of Musk taking ownership, the platform was inundated with hate and disinformation. Not only are extremists celebrating Musk’s takeover of Twitter, they are seeing it as a new opportunity to post the most abusive, harassing, and racist language and imagery. This includes clear threats of violence against people with whom they disagree. Without deliberate efforts by Twitter to address this type of abuse and hate, your brands will be actively supporting accelerating extremism.

Musk has couched his feud with Media Matters as a battle over free speech.

Musk denounced the Media Matters reporting as “fraudulent” in a post on X and threatened to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded” with it, a promise he kept when he filed the suit in federal court in Texas days later.

Musk’s complaint alleges that Media Matters manipulated X’s algorithm to produce the screenshots and essentially employed a biased methodology that intentionally skewed the results of its report toward “fringe” content on the site.

Musk has couched his feud with Media Matters as a battle over free speech, and due to his newfound prominence among conservatives, Republican politicians have come to his aid. On the same day Musk filed the lawsuit, Texas’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced an investigation into Media Matters for potential fraud in its reporting on X.

Last March, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, filed a lawsuit against Media Matters, alleging that it failed to turn over internal documents in connection with its coverage of hate speech on X.

A Chilling Effect

Free speech advocates worry that lawsuits like the ones X brought against Media Matters are intended not just to punish those groups and silence their critiques but also to warn any other groups or individuals who dare criticize X and its owner.

Whether Musk’s lawsuits succeed or not, the suits threaten to chill free speech simply by imposing massive, potentially untenable, legal costs on the organizations and individuals.

With the mounting pressures of the X lawsuit, Media Matters laid off a dozen staffers last May. The nonprofit’s president, Angelo Carusone, said in a statement that the cuts were necessary to keep Media Matters “sustainable” while “confronting a legal assault on multiple fronts.”

On the day of the layoffs, Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters, posted on X, “Many of my best colleagues at Media Matters lost their jobs today. I’m sharing their announcements in this thread. However you feel about our work, it should worry you that any billionaire could do this to any outlet at any time for any reason. It’s a sad day for free speech.”

“It’s concerning that defamation lawsuits can be used to silence speech,” Richard W. Painter, a professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota, told NPQ.

With the mounting pressures of the X lawsuit, Media Matters laid off a dozen staffers last May.

Painter also noted that it’s “ironic” that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protecting online expression shields X and other online platforms from being sued for providing a forum for defamatory content made by its users—but X is suing Media Matters for defamation.

“That seems very asymmetrical,” he said.

A California judge tossed another lawsuit brought by X Corp. against the Center for Countering Digital Hate last May, ruling that the lawsuit was an attempt to “punish” Musk’s critics.

Last August, Mother Jones reported that lawyers representing Musk and X in the Media Matters case “have quietly begun sending subpoenas to a host of public interest groups,” including the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Access Now, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

Jessica González, a co-CEO of the Free Press media policy organization, told Mother Jones these subpoenas will have “a chilling effect on advocacy and on freedom of expression.”

“It’s really cynical, actually: ‘Mr. Free Speech’ going after anyone who’s criticized him,” González told Mother Jones.