JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) – Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is suing far-left media “watchdog” Media Matters for America (MMFA) to force it to hand over documents pertaining to the state’s investigation into whether it used fraud to solicit donations for its war on X, the speech-friendly social network formerly known as Twitter.
Media Matters describes its mission as “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” but conservatives say its true mission is to demonize conservative voices and promote leftist narratives and misinformation. Leftist billionaire George Soros has supported the organization with millions in donations since its birth in 2004, though he didn’t go public with his support until 2010.
Media Matters founder David Brock has described the organization’s mission as “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” against Fox News but has also branched out to other major outlets deemed out of step with the Left. It has also advocated censoring conservatives on social networks such as Facebook, to which Elon Musk’s purchase and transformation of Twitter stands in opposition.
“My office has reason to believe Media Matters used fraud to solicit donations from Missourians in order to bully advertisers into pulling out of X, the last social media platform dedicated to free speech in America, so we launched an investigation to get to the bottom of it,” Bailey said Monday. “However, Media Matters has a sordid history of refusing to cooperate with investigations. I’m not going to let this activist group stonewall us. If there has been any attempt to defraud Missourians in order to trample on their free speech rights, I will root it out and hold bad actors accountable.”
The AG’s office suspects MMFA of deceptively manipulating X’s algorithm to “place advertisers’ content next to contrived controversial posts, causing X to suffer astronomical financial losses when affected advertisers pulled their money from the site” in violation of Missouri Merchandising Practices Act. He now wants a court order forcing Media Matters to hand over the requested documents within 20 days.
Fox News noted that a similar investigation into MMFA is also underway in Texas and that Musk himself sued the organization as well, although a judge dismissed that suit Monday, claiming it was “about punishing the Defendants for their speech.” Musk says he will appeal.
Musk purchased Twitter (which he renamed X) in October 2022 and set to work making it more open and politically neutral. To that end, he has instituted a number of reforms to the platform and other actions that have overjoyed conservatives, such as replacing fact-checkers with a far more accurate, user-driven Community Notes feature, releasing troves of information about the previous management’s censorship activities, and reinstating numerous high-profile accounts banned by the old regime.
However, there have also been some setbacks and causes for concern as to how thoroughly the platform will change, such as Musk hiring former World Economic Forum executive chair Linda Yaccarino to take over day-to-day business operations as CEO and giving lip service to the notion that “outrageous” content should be subject to reduced “freedom of reach.”
On top of his reforms to X, Musk has used his platform to personally highlight stories and information at odds with prevailing left-wing narratives, and pledged to financially support legal challenges by various individuals who were subjected to reprisals for expressing themselves online.