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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Freedom of the press was ensconced in the First Amendment:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Freedom of the press mandates it be allowed to expose state and corporate secrets, as well as increasing transparency of government and other powerful institutions, in order to enhance democratic discourse on all subjects.
The above appeared in an article criticizing the U.S. government egged on by the FBI and CIA in its heinous persecution of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
What is worse is the continued and increasing abuse by wealthy corporations from Apple to X to keep the truth about nearly everything, but primarily their own predilection for hiding their own nefarious activities from the eyes of the world by suing those who criticize them into dissolution or bankruptcy.
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a small, not-for-profit initiative, is dissolving after Elon Musk accused the group of orchestrating a boycott and initiated a lawsuit, the legal costs for which will place too severe a strain on GARM’s limited resources to allow it to continue operations.
The Texas-filed lawsuit claims GARM “conspired” with leading brands to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from X, Musk’s money-trumps-all remake of Twitter.
In the wake of the non-profit’s founding in 2019 as a voluntary cross-industry initiative to address appropriate posting of digital advertising on social media platforms, their tools provided assistance to respected brands to ensure their ads would not appear adjacent to, and possibly implying endorsement of, disturbing and illicit content including terrorism, child pornography and rampant conspiracy theories.
GARM was set up after the Christchurch New Zealand Mosque shootings during which the killer livestreamed the attack on Facebook, to help companies avoid inadvertently supporting harmful and illegal posts, reducing such ads from 6.1% in 2020 to 1.7% in 2023.
When companies pulled ads from X, instead of better curating the content of his Wild West site, the multi-billionaire doubled down to protect the purveyors of unsavory posts, and proceeded to expend his millions on suing GARM and other non-profits for alerting brands to their reputational danger and providing tools for them to selectively stop spending money on social media buys.
Chief executive for X, Linda Yaccarino, posted “No small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized.”
But it was Musk’s threat when he bought Twitter to usher in a new era of unrestricted speech removing rules against lies and hateful content that drove major brands, including CVS and Unilever, to pull ads from X.
Pro-business Ohio Republican Jim Jordan as head of the House Judiciary Committee had attacked GARM claiming the small non-profit was “attempting to influence what content appears online by starving disfavored content, or even entire platforms, of advertising dollars needed to survive” which fraudulently controlled online speech and unfairly impacted conservative news outlets such as “Fox News, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart News.”
Mm-m – so disgraceful for anyone to criticize those paragons of virtue, the destitute and long-suffering Fox News and Elon Musk...
Musk has filed multiple lawsuits against organizations attempting to curb the spread of his sponsorship of untruthful, incendiary and otherwise toxic online posts. Late last year the well-respected Media Matters reportedly had to lay off staff working on important issues to circle the wagons against yet another X lawsuit alleging claims similar to those Musk brought against GARM.
As reported in CityWatch, “X-owner, multi-zillionaire Elon Musk instituted a thermonuclear lawsuit (his words) against Media Matters, its board and even its donors in an attempt to financially obliterate the non-profit watchdog fighting to protect the public from manipulative content, and imperiling Musk’s personal profit.”
The ripple effect of this proliferation of lawsuits against non-profits has created problems for those researching extremism, disinformation and other malicious online content, and has amplified coordinated right-wing attacks on freedom of speech and academic discourse.
Defensively, since most of his platform’s income is derived from advertising, the spoilt billionaire boy-child recently posted: “We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words, now, it is war.”
Hopefully the leaders of the corporations in question will have the gumption to turn their backs on Musk and his bought-and-paid-for muscle at all levels of government, and respect their customers’ values. And starve billionaire bullies like Elon Musk out of our lives.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
