It seems to me that defamation here hinges on exactly what Media Matters said their little experiment shows about X: if they indicated that they were capturing the horrific state of the general user experience with respect to ads and offensive posts, then this was a really malicious lie.
Otherwise, they were just using X in a strange manner, which is not defamatory in itself.
> But that [the claim that "brands are now 'protected from the risk of being next to' potentially toxic content."] certainly isn’t the case for at least five major brands: We recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity, and IBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party on X. Here they are: <screenshots>
Nothing is said about how common/rare this occurrence is nor whether anything specific needs to be done to observe such a result.
And if you are one of those advertisers, how "common" a problem does this have to be to make you think you don't want to advertise there anymore? Even X's filing doesn't claim this "can't happen", just that it doesn't happen frequently.
For CMOs making major ad buys for carefully curated marquis brands like Apple, IBM, et al, I suspect that the only concrete number that they want to be assured of by their advertising platform is "0".
0 is impossible and advertisers realize that, which is why large user-generated content companies set up a Trust and Safety team to rapidly respond to these issues to placate advertisers.
Too bad Elon fired Twitter/X's Trust and Safety team!
What could a "trust and safety" team even do when the site owner/CEO spends his time directly responding to racist diatribes with positive encouragement [0] ? Like you can't pass off the nastiness as just "some users" or otherwise exceptional when it's being directly nurtured by the forum admin. So the resulting question is more like when to stop advertising somewhere the admin seems intent on making into Stormfront Lite?
[0] https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1724908287471272299 . I'm including this link even though it's been referenced to death, because reading primary sources is important - especially with people people becoming desensitized to claims of racism from a media landscape that often takes things out of context and heavily paraphrases to blow them out of proportion, which is decidedly not what happened here.
Not in the article that article (written by the defendants) - the lawsuit, following the example of others, explains how they poked and prodded in very unnatural ways, trying to contrive a circumstance in which ads would be shown next to certain posts - and they did find such! X contends no actual users were or ever would be in this same circumstance, so no brand damage was actually done.
It may hinge on exactly how strong the 'protection' is that Yaccarino alluded to is inferred to be - whether it's reasonable to infer she meant that content moderation under Musk was now perfected and 100% hateproof, at least with respect to ads.
Sure, but the issue is that defamation requires a false statement of fact. Elon may not be happy that the article is missing context, but that's not the same thing as claiming something false.
> X contends no actual users were or ever would be in this same circumstance, so no brand damage was actually done.
If that's what they want to contend then this lawsuit is probably not the right vehicle. They'd probably be better off making that argument to their advertisers.
The contention is close, but not exactly that - it would be that when MM said 'Yaccarino was wrong, here's proof', this was defamatory because 'protected' was never meant to imply 100% perfect protection, and therefore claims that her statement was disproven - with their contrived method - are false and malicious.
It may well be a weak case. MM are certainly slimy political operators, but they seem to have mostly avoided any direct statements which are easily, unambiguously provably false.
> it would be that when MM said 'Yaccarino was wrong, here's proof', this was defamatory because 'protected' was never meant to imply 100% perfect protection, and therefore claims that her statement was disproven - with their contrived method - are false and malicious.
I'm honestly not sure how that would be legally analyzed. It doesn't really feel like a very convincing argument, but I don't think I can articulate exactly why.
In any case, it doesn't seem that particular line of argument is present in the complaint, so it's pretty much just a curiosity.
Otherwise, they were just using X in a strange manner, which is not defamatory in itself.