[robomartin]

Having been involved in a few legal battles over the decades I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that nobody on the outside of a trial has a clue or a valid opinion at all. That includes me, of course.

This is why courts and lawsuits are about. The evidence has to be presented with sufficient detail and clarity for a legal conclusion to be reached. Nothing else anyone says matters at all.

My comments on this are very simple:

If anyone is going to comment, at least read the court filing.

Understand that groups like Media Matters and the media have been in the business of search-and-destroy-at-all-costs for years. These are not wholesome organizations. They are violent organizations, with their violence taking the form of the indiscriminate destruction of anyone who does not align with a certain narrative.

Am I biased? Of course! Because I know exactly what the blind support of these kinds of nefarious actors can do to a society and the nation. Just go down the list of Latin American (LATAM) countries for examples of just how ugly things can get.

I know the HN crowd can be deeply ideologically aligned with these leftist organizations. So be it. If nobody here presents contrast there's a zero percent probability of anyone actually thinking and realizing that what has been pounded into their brains is a ridiculous destructive fantasy.

Do we have to get to total societal destruction and 40% unemployment before people wake up and understand? I hope not. Coming back from that is almost impossible. Again, look at LATAM.

I have always referred to LATAM as "the time machine for the US". Everything that is happening here has already happened in LATAM a million different ways as far back as decades ago. We know, without any doubt, how this ends. And it isn't good.

So, no, Media Matters, their inner and outer circles are not organizations dedicated to improving society. Not even close. They exist to destroy whatever and whoever they tag as the opposition.

In some ways this is analog to the idea of finding obscure bugs in software.

One approach is to do the work, explore very rare corner cases, privately contact the company to make them aware of it so they can fix it before it becomes public knowledge. That is constructive and useful for society.

The other approach is to immediately take the information public and use it to try to destroy the company, product and people as well as their reputation to the extent possible. That is not useful to society at all.

We need to stop this nonsense or we are going to become victims of our own stupidity. I don't know how else to say it.

You have in Elon Musk who has been dedicated to advancing society with everything he touches. Instead of embracing his work and helping push it forward, you have political/ideological activists and organizations dedicated to nothing less than destroying him and his work.

How the hell is this good for society? What is left if we don't have anyone like him left in this society? I can name a few countries where this is the case. It ain't pretty. Wake the fuck up!

[rsynnott]

Well, I mean, personally I think that society would be a lot better off if that arsehole would think a bit more before he tweeted, so I expect we’re not going to agree.

[robomartin]

No, we can agree on that. Why not?

Here's the important difference (and this relates to free speech as well):

We can think someone is a an imbecile, asshole, jerk, idiot even a criminal (not talking about Musk, just in general terms). That does not mean they cease to have rights under the law.

A fundamental idea behind free speech is that, in order to protect it, we must protect speech with which we might disagree.

You don't ever have to respect or agree with me. And I can think the same of you. However, if we want to live in a civilized society and have a future, I have to respect your rights and protect you from abuse because, when the time comes, I need you to respect and protect mine with the same fervor. That's the way it works.

It is all too easy to exist in an echo chamber where we only allow and are exposed to things with which we agree. However, this does not promote an open society at all. This closes-off societies and leads to truly nasty outcomes.

Trump is an excellent example of this. His policies? For the most part, excellent and right on point. Yet, every time he opened his mouth he inspired me into projectile vomiting. Do we stop listening to someone just because we don't like their public persona? What they might look like? The color of their skin? Where they were born? The clothes they wear? How wealthy or poor they might be? Etc.

I hope not.

Must can be a jerk on X and still have rights under the law. One thing does not negate the other.

If his allegations are true, Media Matters explicitly sought to damage X and Musk through a process engineered to do just that. And, instead of bringing up the 0.000000000000009 black swan event they found to X's attention, they chose to weaponize it. This led to significant financial losses to X. This isn't right at all.

A natural process would have posting an ad somewhere requesting millions of people to provide proof of what they were looking for. Do it in the open. Why not? I am sure the New York Times would give them a full page ad for free. If a statistically significant percentage of participants identifies well documented transgressions, well, then they could have had something. That's very different from manipulating the experiment to achieve the result you want.

Can you find port on YouTube? Absolutely. It's out there. In many forms. People have reported this. Does this mean YT is a porn site or that Google promotes porn as a company policy? No, of course not. Does this mean that Google management promotes porn? No!

Can you find anti-Semitic or racist content on YouTube? Of course you can. Again, does this mean Google and the people who work there are anti-Semitic. Of course not!

Can you design an experiment to show ads being placed next to anti-Semitic, racist, pornographic and objectionable content on Google, Bing, YouTube and other platforms? Of course you can! Again, that does not prove those organizations to be any of those things.

At some point we have to behave as adults in the room. We can't have politicians and political organizations ruin society by engaging in deceitful manipulative character assassination campaigns against everything and everyone who doesn't agree with them.

At the limit you end-up becoming something like Russia (or other lands) where the cost of having a different outlook on life is life in prison, torture or death. That's what allowing the ideologically-motivated character assassination of people and organizations ultimately leads to.

Perhaps the better point is that this does not lead to anything good for society. How could it? How could politically-motivated defamation campaigns lead to good results of any kind? I can't think of a single scenario where that could be true.

So, yeah, we can hate someone, their ideas or how the handle themselves. However, we have to protect their right to protection under the law for a wide range of things, from slander to physical and financial harm, and more. That's how a society with a future behaves. Not by protecting and standing-up for only those you like.