Twitter (the company that Elon Musk insists upon calling “X”) appears to be hemorrhaging advertisers. And it’s responded to this lost revenue by suing a prominent critic of the increasingly right-wing social media website: Media Matters, a left-leaning organization known for criticizing conservative and GOP-aligned outlets.
Ordinarily, this lawsuit would be the kind of stunt that legal observers could probably ignore. The First Amendment provides extraordinarily robust protections against lawsuits that target speech.
But the case was just reassigned to Judge Reed O’Connor, a notoriously partisan former Republican Senate staffer, known for handing down poorly reasoned opinions giving major policy victories to right-wing litigants. O’Connor is frequently reversed by the Supreme Court, even though this Court is also quite conservative.
In fairness, Media Matters does have some tools it can use to mitigate O’Connor’s ability to shape the outcome of this lawsuit — most significantly, it can demand that the case be heard by a jury. But trial judges have a great deal of authority to manipulate who sits on a jury and what evidence that jury sees. And judges, not juries, decide legal questions such as whether Twitter’s lawsuit is barred by the First Amendment.
Thus Twitter’s suit, known as X v. Media Matters, is now a potentially very expensive threat to Media Matters. O’Connor’s long record of handing down dubiously reasoned decisions benefitting right-wing litigants and causes suggests that he could do the same in the Media Matters lawsuit.
Worse, O’Connor’s decisions appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a far-right court dominated by Trump appointees and other MAGA loyalists who share O’Connor’s penchant for manipulating the law to achieve right-wing results. So, even if Media Matters ultimately prevails in this lawsuit, it could be forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills…
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