In November 2023, about a year after Elon Musk took over Twitter, Media Matters for America made a splash with a report claiming that the platform, by then rebranded as X, was "placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content." Musk responded by threatening a "thermonuclear lawsuit" against Media Matters, while Stephen Miller, now a White House deputy chief of staff, suggested that "conservative state Attorneys General" should investigate the organization for "fraud."
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey took Miller's advice, launching investigations that were ultimately blocked by federal courts on First Amendment grounds. But after those threats fizzled out, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began its own probe of Media Matters—a blatant assault on freedom of speech at the center of a case that a federal appeals court heard on Monday.
