A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has temporarily blocked Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey in his attempt to investigate the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America.
Bailey, a Republican, filed a suit to try to investigate Media Matters over reporting that criticized tech billionaire Elon Musk's tolerance of extremism and hate speech on his X platform, formerly Twitter.
“Media Matters, a self-styled not-for-profit ‘progressive research and information center,’ envisions itself monitoring, analyzing, and correcting ‘conservative misinformation’ in the U.S. media," stated Bailey when he filed the suit.
"In fact, this description falls far short of reality for this political activist organization. Instead, rather than passively ‘monitoring,’ Media Matters has used fraud to solicit donations from Missourians in order to trick advertisers into removing their advertisements from X, formerly Twitter, one of the last platforms dedicated to free speech in America.”
Bailey further accuses Media Matters of manipulating X's algorithm to ensure advertisers would have their content next to controversial posts.
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But in an order issued on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta issued a preliminary injunction that blocks Bailey from enforcing this investigation, which has been decried by critics as an effort to deny Media Matters its First Amendment rights.
Mehta issued a similar order blocking Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is pursuing a similar investigation of Media Matters under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Media Matters' CEO, Angelo Carusone, has accused Musk of using his platform to urge Republican attorneys general around the country to file cases like this as a campaign of harassment and intimidation.
X filed its own lawsuit in federal court against the World Federation of Advertisers, CVS, Orsted, Unilever, and Mars, alleging a conspiracy to deprive the social media platform of revenue. The case, which has been blasted by legal experts as meritless, was filed in Wichita Falls, Texas, specifically so that it would be assigned to the far-right partisan Judge Reed O'Connor, best known for a later-overturned ruling that would have completely abolished the Affordable Care Act.
In a twist, however, O'Connor, who holds stock in Unilever and in Musk's electric vehicle company Tesla, recused himself from the case.