Mother Jones illustration; Anna Moneymaker/Getty
In recent weeks, in his prolific activity on X, the social network he owns, Elon Musk has shared a deepfake of Kamala Harris, calling it “amazing.” He’s shared inflammatory posts about England’s anti-immigrant riots while opining that “civil war is inevitable.” He’s fended off calls from five Democratic secretaries of state to reform Grok, X’s AI bot, after it shared false electoral information.
All of this follows years of stalling engagement on the platform and a broader decline under his ownership, as advertisers fled a site newly-receptive racist pseudoscience, antisemitism, and restoring noxious figures’ accounts. Their departure may have been hastened by Musk advising advertisers, twice, to “go fuck yourself,” during an on-stage New York Times interview. Or it may be because Musk used his privileged position, as a study released Thursday said, to become one of the site’s mostly widely-seen purveyors of election disinformation, racking up 1.2 billion views on the subject between January and July.
But on Tuesday Musk revealed where he’d like to place the blame by announcing a lawsuit targeting two related ad industry trade groups, alleging they had worked together to “withhold” billions of dollars in advertising from X in a “coercive exercise of market power.”
“We have tried peace for two years,” Musk declared in launching the suit. “Now it is war.”
According to Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Musk “is clearly outraged at the precipitous drop in advertising dollars since he’s taken over… Instead of owning up to the fact that its the change in the content moderation policies that he’s instituted and take responsibility for that, he’s trying to point the finger.”
The attention-grabbing antitrust lawsuit accuses the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the........