Mother Jones; Marc Piasecki/Getty
Lawyers representing Elon Musk and X, previously known as Twitter, have quietly begun sending subpoenas to a host of public interest groups, Mother Jones has learned. Most of the targeted organizations have signed open letters to X’s advertisers expressing concerns about the platform’s direction under Musk’s leadership.
The groups include the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the digital rights organization Access Now, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). The subpoenas represent a new chapter in the legal war Musk launched after advertisers fled X, and are part of a lawsuit Musk and X first filed about a year ago against Media Matters over a report it published documenting that ads appeared alongside extremist content. The subpoenas demand any correspondence the organizations have had with that progressive media watchdog group. Several targets told Mother Jones they’ve had no or limited interaction with Media Matters, and that the subpoenas feel, in the words of more than one person, like “a fishing expedition.”
“It’s really cynical, actually: Mr. Free Speech going after anyone who’s criticized him.”
“We were sent a subpoena,” confirms Jim Naureckas, the editor of FAIR, which has been documenting corporate media bias since 1986. In his 34 years there, Naureckas adds, this is their first subpoena.
While “it was very exciting,” he jokes, he says it is not something for which they can provide any responsive materials. “It’s a long convoluted subpoena looking for a bunch of stuff we don’t have. If we were enthusiastic Elon Musk fans who wanted to help him with his lawsuit against Media Matters, I don’t know what we’d give him.”
Representatives for the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Center for Countering Digital Hate also confirmed they had received subpoenas; other signatories on the open letters did not respond to requests for comment.
One of the letters was sent in May 2022 to express concern about Musk’s plan to take over Twitter, and was spearheaded by Media Matters alongside the big tech watchdog group Accountable Tech and the women’s rights nonprofit Ultraviolet. The other, from a coalition calling itself Stop Toxic Twitter, was sent to the platform’s top ad-buyers in November 2022; Media Matters was one of its lead signatories. Media Matters and their legal counsel declined to comment. Twitter, which no longer responds to requests for comment, could not be reached.
FAIR, for the record, had not signed either letter, but had written about X’s lawsuit targeting Media Matters, calling it an attack on free speech. “If a blog post is evidence of collaboration, that’s a stance that’s somewhat hostile to the First Amendment,” Naureckas dryly says.
With advertisers marching away from his site, Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” launched what he called a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters in November 2023 over its report warning that paid content from major companies like Apple and Oracle was being placed along bigoted material on X. Musk and X contend that Media Matters “manipulated” the algorithm to make the ads appear alongside such content.
The company filed in the Northern District of Texas, where it will appear before Judge Reed O’Connor, who holds $15,000 of stock in Tesla, Musk’s other company. (Earlier this week, Media Matters lost its bid to have O’Connor recuse himself.) Media Matters has also filed to dismiss the case, which O’Connor has not yet ruled on; in the meantime, he has ordered that Media Matters must comply with an expansive discovery request from X’s lawyers. Musk is also taking legal action against ad industry trade groups, accusing the organizations of engaging in an illegal group boycott against X. Seemingly in response to the suit, one of the groups, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, said it would discontinue its work.
Similarly, the new subpoenas from X’s lawyers will have “a chilling effect on advocacy and on freedom of expression,” says Jessica González, a co-CEO of the media policy organization Free Press. “It’s really cynical, actually: Mr. Free Speech going after anyone who’s criticized him.”
While Free Press, despite being an original convenor of Stop Toxic Twitter, has not received a subpoena, González worries about the effects on organizations that have. Advocacy groups coming together to speak up for the rights of their communities, she says, “are what free speech is all about.”
“By going on a lawsuit spree and issuing subpoenas to a number of organizations who signed a letter,” she explains, “folks have to think twice about whether they’re going to speak up on behalf of their communities. It’s threatening to smaller organizations with smaller budgets.”
“There’s a grim rationality to his legal activities,” says Imran Ahmed, the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s founder and CEO, of Musk. “They’re the desperate actions of a man trying to avoid accountability for what he knows is atrocious behavior.” Ahmed believes Musk knows the behavior is bad, he added, because he himself said in 2022 that Twitter could not be allowed to become “a free-for-all hellscape,” which critics argue it has.
In February, Musk lost a lawsuit that targeted the Center for Countering Digital Hate, when a federal judge in California ruled that the suit represented a clear effort to “punish” the group for criticizing Twitter. “He’s officially someone who’s tried to use strategic litigation to silence an organization, for all his First Amendment purity,” explains Ahmed.
Ahmed says his group’s lawyers have already raised that loss in pushing back against X’s latest subpoena, objecting that it is not only “vague, ambiguous and unintelligible,” but that it “clearly seeks information that X had sought to obtain in another, completely separate case that X brought against CCDH that has been dismissed with prejudice.”
“He’s revealing the extent to which this has never been about free speech,” says Ahmed. “It’s always been about protecting revenue.”
