Shellenberger: The Alliance Between Advertisers And Democrats Pushing Censorship

 Michael Shellenberger discusses his latest Substack post on Media Matters and the Democratic Party's attempt to associate X/Twitter with anti-Semitism on Monday with FNC's Jesse Watters.

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.

...

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.

JESSE ATTERS, FOX NEWS: That's what they are trying to put Trump out for. For saying his company was worth more... They want to strip his business license for that, even though there is no proof, and we have proof Media Matters did the same thing. If they are honest, they would say, your honor, I am guilty.

SHELLENBERGER: That is right, we point out in today's article that Media Matters has always been a front group for the Democratic Party and Democratic Party donors. You have this alliance between the advertisers and a political party to censor and control what's on media platforms. That is very scary and very dangerous, people should be concerned about what is happening and speak up and defend free speech on X and all other social media platforms because it is currently under attack by Media Matters.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/11/21/shellenberger_the_alliance_between_advertisers_and_democrats_pushing_censorship.html