President Donald Trump's administration has now officially opened an investigation into a progressive advocacy group that has long been a thorn in the side of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
The New York Times reported Thursday that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now looking into whether Media Matters for America (MMFA) — which focuses on debunking claims propagated by right-wing media — illegally colluded with advertisers on the social media platform X (which is owned by Musk). The FTC probe comes amid a lawsuit by Musk in which he's seeking damages from MMFA, alleging that the group damaged his relationship with advertisers and prompted a mass exodus of advertising dollars from the platform.
MMFA published a report in 2023 finding that ads sometimes appeared next to extremist content on X. The report found that major advertisers like Apple, IBM and Oracle had ads placed in close proximity to accounts that tweeted pro-Nazi content. Musk's lawsuit alleged that MMFA misrepresented data and insisted that the chances of an advertiser's paid post appearing next to extremist tweets were "rare."
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"Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers’ posts on X Corp.’s social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform,” the complaint read. “Media Matters designed both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”
In response to Musk's lawsuit, MMFA President Angelo Carusone called the litigation "frivolous" that was "meant to bully X's critics into silence."
"Media Matters stands behind its reporting and looks forward to winning in court," he said.
Click here to read the Times' article in full (subscription required).
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