Elon Musk's Thermonuclear Defamation Suit Is a Dud

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Sorry, occupational hazard: This is not legal advice, nor can I give you legal advice. I AM NOT YOUR LAWYER. Sorry! Everything here is for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. You should contact your attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular issue or problem. Nothing here should be construed to form an attorney-client relationship. Also, some of the links in this post may be affiliate links, meaning, at no cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. But if you click, it really helps me make more of these videos! All non-licensed clips used for fair use commentary, criticism, and educational purposes. See Hosseinzadeh v. Klein, 276 F.Supp.3d 34 (S.D.N.Y. 2017); Equals Three, LLC v. Jukin Media, Inc., 139 F. Supp. 3d 1094 (C.D. Cal. 2015).

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[codyvangogh]

I love that the world has collectively decided to keep calling it Twitter.

[schneeente]

The point of the lawsuit is not to win it, it is to cause financial strain to the defendants to make other journalists think twice about reporting something negative about X, fearing they might have to pay legal fees if they do. I think that intention to intimidate should have been mentioned in the video.

[Unyubaby]

"I'm still gonna call it Twitter." And that's exactly why this name change was stupid, unneeded, and just ego-fuel for a manbaby.

[jakob]

I am here to commend Elon's increasing efforts to make twitter a completely ad free platform

[educing]

Free speech for them, a slapp lawsuit to those who disagree with them and a monthly subscription fee for everyone else.

[rayjaymor]

Wife: "You cheated on me! You slept with Sharon!!"
Me: "This was an extremely rare and uncommon occurrence, and you had to go digging specifically to find this information, so realistically it's not subsantial"

[AndrewJohnson-oyoj]

Every Malignant Narcissist ever: "The problem is you exposing my bad behavior, not that my bad behavior exists."

[jloiben]

Remember folks. There is a reason why Elon was fired in the first 6 months the one time in his professional life he worked at a business that he didn’t control

[tinkerer]

It's kinda like a car company suing a crash center for failing their car in a crash test because they intentionally crashed the car. But what would Elon know about car companies... wait.

[nordicFries]

It's hilarious to say "We define hate speech more narrowly now - and "Hate speech impressions are way down" at the same time. No shit, if you stop counting racial slurs and nazi imagery as hate speech your numbers will go down.

[BIG-Jared]

Not doing business with someone is a form of free speech, Elon.

[mmcmann]

I hope Media Matters asks for EVERYTHING about the finances, user numbers, and advertising in discovery. I have a feeling it will be very embarrassing for him. Well, he doesn’t have the capacity to see it as embarrassing. He will blame everyone else.

[apjtv]

Elon Musk is the sort of client who probably pays more for his lawyer's therapy bills than he does their attorney's fees.

[dracoargentum]

Lol, was just about to type “well, technically, Media Matters _did_ set up the situation for the ads to be set up next each other: they joined twitter.” and then he effectively said it.

[exoZelia]

"Consequences for my actions are weird and new, I don't like it" - Musk, laying awake at night in between ketamine hits

[BatAmerica]

Wow, Elon Musk made a stupid decision involving free speech? In other words, today is still Tuesday.

[pattressel]

Speaking as a (now retired) software engineer, who has been tasked with investigating tricky issues "escalated to engineering", the methods used by Media Matters to detect and document the issue are entirely proper.

First: If the problem occurs randomly, that is, if its frequency is based on statistics, and especially if the problem is reported with low frequency, then in order to reproduce the problem in a reasonable timeframe, and obtain multiple examples of the problem, of course one runs one's test for the issue over and over, preferably under automation, not by having some unfortunate human poking buttons, and one repeats the test as rapidly as is feasible.

Second: One sets up the test using the reported conditions under which the problem occurs. One does not, should not, try any settings whatsoever. This is why we ask users what they did before they observed the problem...so that we can reproduce the conditions. One does not ignore the reported conditions, try something else, then say to the user, sorry, works 4 me... Note that the "user" here is the advertiser, not some random X user looking at their feed. The issue here is not how often does some user who never does anything but look for cat videos encounter a non-cat post with toxic content. It is, does the advertiser encounter the problem, yes or no? Does the advertiser have their ads shown on toxic posts. Of course one must examine toxic posts to reproduce the conditions.

[mikek]

The outcome of any lawsuit won't matter. He'll lose, because he's wrong. But he'll claim bias, and "They" want to take him down. It's all too predictable.

[francespyne]

I will never understand why people don't understand that the constitution specifically states the government shall not . . . It doesn't state a person or company can't

[CinJyxxe]

So here's my thing about this, and I hope any court of law would come to the same conclusion: if I buy a phone, and through a series of easily replicable button presses, I overload the battery and turn it into a potential explosive device. In that situation, regardless of who is legally at fault for the explosion, the phone company will still be legally required to recall that phone model and fix the problem once it is made clear that it is a problem with the phone model itself, not some kind of individual device flaw.

Just because you have to go through a convoluted series of actions to expose a problem doesn't mean that problem doesn't exist. As dumb as he is, Elly-boy knows that. I'm guessing the only reason he doesn't take the much easier approach of fixing how ads work on his site is because he likes it the way it is.