Shellenberger: The Alliance Between Advertisers And Democrats Pushing Censorship | Video | RealClearPolitics
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: It sounds shocking. It sounds like if you are on X, formerly known as Twitter, you are being served up neo-nazi content and it is being tied together with these big brands.
As it turned out, they created fake accounts to follow neo-nazis and say they got those ads served. Well, we did the same thing, as any journalist should have done when they heard about this. We created fake accounts and followed the exact same pro-Nazi accounts that Media Matters claims, and we couldn’t get any ads. We refreshed constantly, we went into the actual content itself. We followed three times more pro-Nazi accounts, same thing, we couldn’t get any ads served up to us.
First of all, we were not able to replicate Media Matters. We asked Media Matters to respond, to explain how they gamed the system to be shown the ads after having already followed neo-Nazi content. We didn’t hear back from them. I think that tells you that what is going on here, there is more than meets the eye, I would say.
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I’m a huge First Amendment advocate, I want free speech. People even have the right to lie, but you can’t commit fraud, that is one of the restrictions on free speech. You can’t do what Media Matters appears to be doing here, which is to manipulate a situation, to lie about what is actually going on with a business in order, specifically, to hurt that business.
They created the story they wanted to sell here, which is that somehow there is a lot of antisemitism on X, that somehow brands are associated with antisemitism, and they had that in mind before they did their research. This is clearly a case where they are using fraudulent methods to lie to, to manipulate that platform, to lie to businesses on business questions. That starts to look like fraud and can be very expensive and dangerous for Media Matters.
Why that darn Media Matters. That’s just sneaky.