Media Matters president Angelo Carusone says Elon Musk’s legal threat against the news watchdog organization is welcome. As he told MSNBC’s Paola Ramos, “I think the most important thing is that in his response in that legal threat, he actually confirmed that our reporting was accurate.”
“I mean, everything, he said that everything in our report, actually, as we said existed, did actually exist on the platform,” Carusone continued. “And that’s basically our core argument, is that the platform is so saturated with extremism, with white genocide, with antisemitism, with racism, with conspiracy theories — things that otherwise should be managed in some way — that they can’t actually protect the few brands that are still willing to remain on the platform.”
The pair also spoke about the fact that a number of high-profile companies, including Lionsgate, Apple and Warner Bros., have suspended advertising campaigns on X. Carusone said “the thing that was significant” is that Musk’s “own conduct” caused the mass advertiser exodus, “because that gave a lens for the advertisers to sort of analyze what was actually taking place on the platform.”
Things took a sour turn for X on Wednesday after Musk agreed with an antisemitic tweet from his personal account the day before. After @breakingbaht wrote, “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.”
As Ramos pointed out in her segment, this wasn’t the first time Musk had endorsed antisemitic ideas. Musk has argued that those calling him antisemitic are prohibiting free speech on the platform and beyond, a charge Carusone disputed.
“That’s not what it’s about at all. None of his conduct suggests that that’s what his ownership and his execution of Twitter, of X really is,” he said. “It really is about taking these ideas and leveraging the power of a social media apparatus to help evangelize them and spread them.”
Carusone continued, “So when he lets more of these individuals back on the platform, the intention there — or at least the effect, regardless of the intention, or who knows — but the effect, and he knows what the effect is, is to add more of that content to the platform so that the algorithm can then promote it and recommend it to potentially like-minded individuals to help spread, it to help that idea metastasize.”
Watch the interview with Carusone in the video above.
