The MRC Flips Over Elon Musk, Part 24: A Slow Summer Of Musk-Fluffing
The Media Research Center wants snuff videos and hate speech posted on Twitter/X -- but also surprisingly uses X's own AI to attack the site for not being right-wing enough.
An April 23 post by Media Research Center writer Christian Baldwin carried the misleading headline “WATCH: The Absurd Reason This Senator Claims Elon Musk ‘Should Be in Jail’.” Despite what Baldwin is suggesting, the senator in question is in Australia, not the U.S. From there, Baldwin is angry that Australian government officials are trying to remove videos of acts of violence — specifically, what are essentially snuff films of people getting stabbed — off Twitter/X:
Elon Musk has been targeted by yet another authoritarian government for his company X’s reluctance to censor political content.
In an April 23 interview with Sky News, Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie appeared to threaten Elon Musk over his well-known advocacy for free speech and the way his company X handles political content on its platform, specifically X’s refusal to censor videos of recent attacks in Australia, contradicting the orders of the country’s eSafety commission.
Lambie engaged in a vitriolic spree against the tech mogul and considerably blackened his character.
“So when it comes to the tech billionaire, like I’ve already said, I think he’s a social media nob with no social conscience,” Lambie said. “He has absolutely no social conscience.”
The senator then proceeded to issue explicit threats against Musk, advocating for him to be imprisoned.
“Someone like that should be in jail, and the key be thrown away,” Lambie asserted. “That bloke should not have a right to be out there on his own ideology platform and creating hatred, you know, showing all this stuff out there to our kids and all the rest.”
[…]
The controversy comes after X was ordered by Grant on April 16 to take down two videos of stabbings.
One video depicted a bishop and a priest being stabbed during a live-streamed mass, and the other video showed a knife-wielding assailant killing six at a mall. X refused to comply with the request because its Global Government Affairs team argued that the request was not within the scope of Australian law nor did the videos violate X’s own policies.
Baldwin didn’t explain why the world needs to see these snuff videos, or why people must have these snuff videos freely available to them. The rest of the MRC hasn’t explained their lust for blood either.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Lord used his April 27 column to rehash an old controversy:
Uri Berliner’s expose of the ideological unanimity at NPR reminds the Republican half of America that they send their taxpayer dollars to Washington to have their viewpoints excluded or ridiculed as “far right” hate.
Back there in the Stone Age of 2023, Elon Musk, he of X that is formerly Twitter, antagonized NPR and PBS because – ready? Musk had made some changes to “state-affiliated” media designations, applying the term to both of those outlets. They’re state-funded, but not state-affiliated?
While stripping the designation from media outlets tied to governments like those of Russia and Iran, Musk had the nerve – the nerve! – to apply it to, among others, America’s NPR and PBS along with the UK’s BBC and Canada’s CBC.
As ConWebWatch pointed out at the time but Lord won’t — he cited only articles from the MRC and the even more right-wing Western Journal, so he has no interest in telling the full story — Musk’s arbitrary relabeling violated Twitter’s own definition of “state-affiliated media” and ignored the fact that the government does not dictate the content of those outlets. Instead, Lord served up a misleading argument:
There was an easy and obvious way for NPR and PBS to answer Musk’s criticism and get out from under his “state-affiliated” designation once and for all.
That would be: Stop taking money from the government. Period. Stop taking any money from any government apparatus. Period. Make the “P” in NPR and PBS stand not for “Public” – aka taking government funds – but rather “P” as in “Private.” As in “National Private Radio” and “Private Broadcasting Service.”
All of which would make NPR and PBS a genuine private sector competitor with the rest of the American private sector free market in the world of television and radio broadcasting.
Lord forgot to mention that Musk eventually dropped the “state-affiliated media” labeling completely — not just for PBS and NPR but also for outlets that clearly are state propaganda (which the state-run Russian outlet RT was very happy about). That completely defeated the purpose of Musk’s own-the-libs tweaking of those outlets.
Lord and Musk want you to think that government funding equals government — something that, again, neither have proven in the case of NPR and PBS. If it was, their content would have changed during the Trump years — which it didn’t. (And Lord and the MRC would have cheered such biased content).
Cheering hate speech
Baldwin was mad on Musk’s behalf in a May 8 post that a proposed bill in Canada will crack down on online hate speech:
Clinical psychologist and podcast host Jordan B. Peterson and X owner Elon Musk were flabbergasted by Canada’s latest infringement on civil liberties, anti-hate speech bill C-63.
On May 7, Musk and Peterson responded to Canada’s proposed “hate” speech bill. The bill, called. “Online Harms Bill C-63,” would implement fines of up to $50,000 on individuals who post “content that foments hatred” or “that, given the context in which it is communicated, is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of such a prohibited ground.”
Musk initially responded to an X post by user Camus, who pointed out that C-63 would enable ex post facto fines for “hate speech” on social media. “This sounds insane if accurate!” wrote Musk.
Note that Baldwin put “hate speech” in scare quotes, as if there is no objective definition of it. Baldwin also doesn’t note that people and social media site can simply avoid the bill’s restrictions by, you know, not spewing hate speech.
Baldwin again framed his enthusiasm for seeing snuff videos of people getting stabbed as “free speech” and a defense of Musk in a May 13 post:
An Australian federal judge has swooped in to defend free speech by siding with Elon Musk in the tech billionaire’s latest spat with Australia’s Ministry of Truth.
On May 13, Federal Court Justice Geoffrey Kennett blocked the application for the extension of an injunction issued by Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant. The injunction ordered X to censor a video depicting an Australian Bishop being stabbed while delivering Mass in Sydney.
It is expected that the Justice will issue an explanatory statement later in the day, reported SkyNews Australia.
Musk responded to news of the ruling by re-expressing his continued commitment to the cause of free speech globally.
“Not trying to win anything,” Musk posted on X. “I just don’t think we should be suppressing Australia’s rights to free speech.”
Grant issued the injunction on April 16 ordering X to suppress the video even for users outside of the United States. She also threatened the company with a daily fine of $785,000 AUD if it didn’t comply with the order.
X’s Global Government Affairs Team challenged Grant’s authority, citing her lack of jurisdiction over non-Australian users.
X’s lawyers also argued before the Justice that the video in question was not overly graphic and, contrary to the Australian Government’s characterization, did not glorify violence or terrorism.
So Musk thinks it’s OK to post snuff videos on X as long as they “not overly graphic”? And how, exactly, did Musk’s lawyers determine that the video “did not glorify violence or terrorism”? It would seem that any snuff video is a de facto glorification of violence or terrorism for certain people. Rather than get into that, Baldwin gushed that “Musk has faced a lot of pushback and even legal threats for his bold stance in favor of free speech.” You know, maybe Musk does deserve some pushback for permitting snuff videos on X/Twitter.
Baldwin didn’t explain why the Australian government wanting to remove snuff videos made it a “Ministry of Truth.” Seems like Baldwin gets off a bit too much over videos of people getting stabbed.
Courtroom failures
The MRC’s work as Musk’s seemed to slow down around this time — probably because there isn’t much good news to report, particularly on the legal front as his attempts to censor his critics keep getting shut down in court.
First up: Musk had to give a deposition in a defamation lawsuit against him filed by him by a Jewish college student whom Musk had claimed was a neo-Nazi (or a false-flag federal agent pretending to be one). Despite demanding that the deposition not be made public, it was anyway— and it was soon clear why he didn’t want people to see it. He played dumb about the lawsuit, then insisted he was merely speculating about the identification of the person in the picture. Meanwhile, Musk’s lawyer not only was kind of a jerk during the deposition, the student’s lawyers have asked the court to sanction him because he’s doing legal work in a Texas court for the lawsuit despite not being licensed in the state and not having obtained the court’s permission to work there. Musk’s attempt to get the lawsuit dismissed also failed.
Meanwhile, a court tossed Musk’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate — whom the MRC loves to maliciously smear as “digital brownshirts” — because it exposed the proliferation of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other spreading hate speech on Twitter/X. The judge pointed out that Musk’s lawsuit was about “punishing the Defendants for their speech” and specifically to “punish CCDH for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp. — and perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism.” CCDH chairman Imran Ahmed said, “We hope this landmark ruling will embolden public-interest researchers everywhere to continue, and even intensify, their vital work of holding social media companies accountable for the hate and disinformation they host and the harm they cause.”
In a related lawsuit, Media Matters was able to get an injunction against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to stop him from rummaging through documents as part of a legal action thte state filed against it in an echo of Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters for exposing how Twitter/X is placing ads next to offensive content and hate speech (a lawsuit the MRC curiously refuses to talk about). The judge pointed out that Media Matters’ investigative journalism and reporting “are core First Amendment activities,” and any “loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”
And in a non-Twitter-related legal action, the Supreme Court rejected Musk’s request to end a settlement agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that requires him to have a lawyer or “Twitter sitter”) review his social media posts about Tesla to keep him from making fraudulent claims.
Meanwhile, Musk continues to make questionable legal decisions that the MRC has remained quiet about (aside from his attempt to defend the right of people to watch snuff videos). He has announced he will pay the legal expenses of Kulvinder Kaur Gill, a Canadian doctor who tried to sue various people who pointed out her false claims about COVID vaccines and otherwise disagreed with her. He also demanded that the Global Disinformation Index, which instructs advertisers how to avoid harmful content near their ads, be shut down because it flagged one website’s content as misinformation.
A slow summer
The MRC spent much of the summer largely ignoring Musk, doing only a handful of Musk-focused posts. A June 6 post by Tom Olohan cheered that “Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant conceded defeat in a weeks-long effort to force X (formerly Twitter) to censor content she didn’t approve of across the globe.” This was in relation to the snuff video of a bishop being stabbed during a church service that that Olohan, for some reason, really wanted people to be forced to watch.
Catherine Salgado gave Musk space in a June 21 post to walk back his insults of advertisers who don’t want to be associated with his increasingly toxic brand:
Tech mogul Elon Musk has defended and softened his previous comments refusing to crush free speech to please advertisers.
Last November, the owner of X (formerly Twitter) had told anti-free speech advertisers to “go f— yourself,” The Hill noted, but during a conversation with the CEO of a multi-national ad company, Musk walked this back a little.
“It wasn’t to — to advertisers as a whole,” Musk told WWP CEO Mark Read on Wednesday at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. “It was with respect to freedom of speech. I think …it is important to have a global free speech platform, where people from a wide range of opinions can voice their views.”
[…]
Musk returned to his of argument that X is an online public square. “In order for X to be the public square for the world, it really got to be a free speech platform,” he insisted to Read. “Now, that doesn’t mean people can say illegal things. It’s free speech within the bounds of the law.”
Yet free speech concerns remain for X. Not only did X CEO Linda Yaccarino openly brag of censorship on X to please advertisers, but both she and Musk have espoused a policy of “freedom of speech not reach.” This means content deemed objectionable is suppressed.
Salgado doesn’t explain why racism, violence, lies and misinformation should never been blocked or corrected.
Salgado returned for an Aug. 12 Musk-fluffing post:
X owner Elon Musk condemned Big Tech and governments worldwide for their election-meddling censorship.
Over the weekend, Musk went on X (formerly Twitter) to argue that censorship threatens free societies. His words were particularly timely as the UK was making headlines for tracking down individuals exercising freedom of speech online, and Google was involved in a scandal over 2024 election censorship.
“Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. If the truth is suppressed, it is impossible to make an informed voting decision,” Musk wrote on Aug. 10. “The degree to which freedom of speech is being undermined around the world is extremely alarming.”
That was largely it for the MRC’s summer of Musk-fluffing. And it certainly wasn’t going to tell readers about the not-so-positive things Musk and Twitter/X did over the spring and summer:
Musk sucked up to China again in order to gain approval for Tesla to sell its cars there. If you’ll recall, this is something the MRC used to hate Musk for before he got interested in buying Twitter. This may have something to do with the fact that Chinese EV maker BYD is crushing Tesla in the Chinese market.
Musk vowed to allow anti-Semitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes back on the platform.
Musk is cannibalizing his own companies, diverting thousands of AI-capable processors to X/Twitter and away from their original location of Tesla.
X got caught again running ads on posts with offensive content, this time linked to more than 20 hashtags used to promote racist and antisemitic extremism, including #whitepower.”
Musk and his SpaceX operation were sued by former employees alleging that Musk personally ordered their firing after they accused SpaceX of tolerating sexual harassment in the workplace.
Musk whined that too many comic book characters have had their race changed, which he bizarrely declared to be “Nazi shit.”
Musk’s estranged transgender daughter fired back at her father for insisting that she was “not a girl,” was figuratively “dead,” and he that he had been “tricked” into signing off on gender-affirming surgery. She further claimed that Musk would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine.
The grandmother of three of Musk’s children by the musician Grimes says that he refused to allow the children to make a trip to visit an ailing family member.
And we haven’t even gotten to Musk’s rampant election interference, which the MRC really doesn’t want to talk about.
Using X’s AI to bash X
One reason the MRC backed away from its usual nonstop Musk-fluffing over the summer is that it has apparently decided that Twitter/X is not right-wing enough for its satisfaction. Baldwin and Joseph Vazquez spent a July 15 post doing a so-called “study” complaining that Democratic politicians weren’t being downgraded enough by Musk as they hoped he would:
Elon Musk has made strides to turn X (formerly Twitter) into a free speech platform but there are still remnants of the Old Twitter censorship regime and they are interfering in the 2024 election. It now appears that X is actively boosting content posted by Democrat congressional members’ accounts, while simultaneously de-amplifying their GOP counterparts in the middle of an election year.
[…]
Elon Musk has been outspoken about his intention to make X the preeminent digital town square and a platform free of censorship and political interference. But new evidence suggests a radical remnant within the ranks of Musk’s company is side-swiping his free-speech vision by resurrecting the infamous censorship techniques of Old Twitter.
MRC Free Speech America researchers discovered that X is actively boosting content posted by Democrat [sic] congressional members’ accounts, while simultaneously de-amplifying their GOP counterparts during an election year.
The X algorithm assigns each account a “visibility score” on a scale of 0-100. Each of these scores determines which accounts the platform boosts and which it de-boosts, according to X’s AI chatbot, Grok. MRC’s analysts prompted Grok to examine the social media platform’s algorithm — which Musk open-sourced in 2023 in a display of transparency — to calculate the visibility scores for all members of Congress. The algorithm, per Grok, uses four core metrics, also based on a 0-100 scale, to calculate the overall visibility score. The results are in: X’s algorithm overwhelmingly favors the left.
Tilting the scales in favor of Democrats is well-trodden ground for the company, but it is now generally thought of as a thing of the past. These results suggest, however, a continued conflict within X about which policies should guide its operations.
Baldwin and Vazquez offer no evidence that those scores don’t accurately reflect reality, or that what they call “certain holdover employees loyal to the prior censorship regime” are solely responsible for this. Also, Twitter/X making its code open source was a red herring to hide the fact that at the same time, it blocked access to its API tool without paying a hefty fee, demonstrating that Musk doesn’t actually care about transparency. Still, they have their conspiracy theory, and they’re going to run with it:
On one side is Musk and his new approach to technology (like Grok and his commitment to algorithmic transparency); on the other side are legacy algorithms and certain holdover employees loyal to the prior censorship regime.
“I suspect the radical lefties at X are helping their radical besties in Congress, or it could be that the ghosts of Jack Dorsey are still plaguing the algorithm. Either way, it appears to be an inside job,” said MRC Vice President for Free Speech America Dan Schneider in response to our findings. He added, “It might make more sense if the moderates got treated the best by the algorithm, but they don’t. X assigns much better scores to the hard left than it assigns to moderates, and treats moderates better than conservatives. The X continuum consistently favors the left.”
But none of this is based on hard, verified data — Baldwin and Vazquez are using prompts they fed into Twitter/X’s Grok artificial intelligence engine:
MRC researchers have used Grok to good effect. Musk’s AI platform spelled out exactly how the algorithm effectuates its political favoritism.
Grok revealed that X scored accounts across four separate categories, each on a scale 0-100.
The “Mass Appeal” category refers to an account’s diversity of followers. The “Reputation” category refers to an account’s alleged credibility. The “Toxicity” category refers to an account’s “offensiveness” or perceived “harmfulness.” Lastly, the “Follower” category references an account’s ability to retain followers. Each category is weighted differently to come up with a total final score that determines which accounts X boosts and which it deboosts.
MRC researchers prompted Grok with eight tests between July 1 and July 2 to assess how the platform weighted each of the metrics to determine a congressional member’s final visibility score. The four categories were weighted as follows: Mass Appeal (38 percent), Reputation (30 percent), Toxicity (21 percent), and Follow (11 percent).
Across all four categories, X on average consistently rated Democrat members of Congress better than members of the GOP.
But Baldwin and Vazquez give us no reason to trust Grok’s findings. Like all AI engines, it is prone to hallucinations, and it has been caught spreading disinformation in response to political queries. They offer no evidence they have confirmed their alleged data with anyone from Twitter/X.
That was followed by whining that Grok didn’t advance right-wing narratives regarding statements by a certain Democratic senator:
X revealed its love affair with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and when it gave him the highest visibility score out of all of his colleagues in both the House and Senate. His left-wing colleagues in the Senate, by extension, also greatly benefited from this cozy relationship.
Out of 100 senators, the top 42 scores were exclusively bestowed upon Democrats. Republicans made up nearly all the bottom 43 ranked senators. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), a former Democrat who split from the party, was the only exception.
Not only did X crown Schumer’s account with the highest overall “visibility” score (92 out of 100), it also rated him one of the most credible senators on the platform. X gave Schumer a stellar reputation score of 95 out of 100, appearing to overlook many major canards that the senator posted from his account.
Schumer’s X account has repeatedly pushed various fallacies. In one post, Schumer lent credence to former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who gave what is now known to have been false testimony about Trump trying to wrestle the steering wheel of his motorcade from Secret Service agents.
Schumer also posted the debunked claim that Trump had called white supremacists who attended the Charlottesville, Virginia Unite the Right rally in 2016 “very fine people.” A Snopes fact-check rated this claim “false.”
Baldwin and Vazquez’s evidence that Hutchinson gave “false testimony” about Trump — in fact, she merely repeated what she said she was told by Secret Service agent Tony Ornato — was a link to an article by the far-right Western Journal that misspelled Ornato’s name. Ornato abruptly retired two days before he was to testify to the House’s committee, forcing a rescheduling of the testimony; when he finally did testify a few months later, pleaded ignorance and “did not recall” the incident in question or saying anything about it to Hutchinson. The committee “found multiple parts of Ornato’s testimony questionable.” As for the Charlottesville claim, ConWebWatch has pointed out that Snopes has been criticized for ignoring the context of Trump’s words and that he never made a clear, definitive statement about it.
Baldwin and Vazquez concluded by repeating their unproven “radical remnant” conspiracy theory:
Musk’s $43 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022 was a major turning point in the free speech fight against Big Tech censorship. But it’s becoming apparent that holdovers from Old Twitter aren’t letting go of the power they tasted during the 2020 election.
The theory of an internal revolt among Old Regime holdovers at X is also not a new one.
Using its CensorTrack.org database, MRC revealed a shocking spike in censorship cases in 2023 following Musk’s acquisition. This was a major red flag showing how Old Twitter employees had actively undermined Musk’s pragmatic approach to free speech online.
This time, however, Musk’s AI and his actions to make the algorithm transparent are making it much harder for the radical remnant to hide their insubordination from Musk.
Despite having no evidence whatsoever to back up anything Baldwin and Vazquez claimed, the MRC pulled the same stunt the same day — this time targeting Kamala Harris — in a post by Luis Cornelio:
Either Jack Dorsey’s ghost still haunts X’s algorithm or, alternatively, a radical remnant continues to work its dark arts within the platform’s ranks to undermine Elon Musk’s vision of a free-speech platform divorced from its history of election interference.
A new study by MRC Free Speech America researchers found that the X algorithm has actively pushed Vice President Kamala Harris’s account, granting her a broader reach than former President Donald Trump’s potential GOP running mates.
The study, performed using X’s open-source algorithm and its AI chatbot Grok, comes immediately after another MRC report revealed that X was de-amplifying the accounts of Republican members of Congress while simultaneously boosting radical Democrats.
This favoritism is also evident in the 2024 veepstakes, with X promoting Harris significantly more than North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sens. JD Vance (R-OH) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), who are all on Trump’s VP shortlist.
Cornelio similarly failed to offer any verification of the AI-generated claims or why they should be believed at face value, given how the MRC has played gotcha with Google’s AI engines. Like his co-workers, Cornelio invoked the rogue-employee conspiracy theory:
X’s giving Harris an algorithmic advantage suggests that the platform is boosting a widely unpopular candidate against two important backdrops: the Republican National Committee’s convention and Harris’s potential elevation to the presidency.
Biden’s cognitive decline and polls suggesting he could be a one-term president are just adding fuel to the fire of Democrats’ concerns about whether Biden should be the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee. Harris herself has struggled with low polls, with many showing she is more unpopular than her boss. However, Harris benefits from X’s algorithms and longstanding support from Big Tech giants, including Google.
In May, Musk pledged to address the issue of suppressed content when pressed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) on X. “Well, neither conservative [sic] nor progressives should be throttled. The point is to have an even playing field,” Musk responded. “I will investigate.”
It isn’t immediately clear whether Musk has directed his employees to address this issue or if they have ignored his commands. This situation suggests that the ghost of the Jack Dorsey-owned Twitter 1.0 is still affecting the platform and targeting Republicans, despite Musk’s pledge to change this.
Never mind, of course, that Cornelio has absolutely no evidence to back up his conspiracy theory — he’s just perpetuating a right-wing narrative that assumes the only possible reason right-wingers look bad on social media is because of “liberal bias.” And we all know that narrative is more important than facts at the MRC.