Media Matters Says It’s Ending Its Presence on X

The liberal watchdog says changes to the terms of service make it impossible for them to keep posting on the platform.

(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

MEDIA MATTERS, THE LEFT-LEANING WATCHDOG of right-wing media that has been a staple of blue Twitter for nearly two decades, will cease posting on the site starting tonight—a direct result of their lengthy legal fight with the company now known as X and its owner, Elon Musk.

Their reason for going dark, according to staff: changes to X’s terms of service, scheduled to go into effect at midnight tonight, that seem specifically designed to hurt Media Matters’ chances in their legal battle—and highlight the lengths to which Musk will sometimes go to punish his critics.

“Some of the changes to X’s terms of service underscore Elon Musk’s ability and seeming willingness to change the rules of the platform to punish speech,” said Angelo Carusone, chairman and president of Media Matters, in a statement on Wednesday evening. “There’s little reason to believe similar tactics wouldn’t be used again at crucial moments, like in the runup to elections. Having so much power to control the flow of information should concern everyone invested in democracy.”

The two companies have been fighting in court since 2023. That November, Media Matters published a report criticizing Musk’s anything-goes moderation policies and demonstrating that advertisers’ content was sometimes showing up next to hate speech and neo-Nazi posts. X—which was then suffering through a damaging exodus of advertisers due to exactly these concerns—quickly filed what Musk described as a “thermonuclear lawsuit” accusing Media Matters of gaming X’s algorithm in a way that “misrepresented the real user experience.” Media Matters called the lawsuit “frivolous,” accused Musk of trying to weaponize the law to silence critics, and vowed to fight it out in court.

Much of the recent court wrangling, however, hasn’t concerned the merits of Musk’s accusation but a preliminary procedural matter: Which court or courts provide the proper venue for trying the case? X didn’t file its lawsuit in San Francisco, where X was then based, or in Washington, D.C., home of Media Matters. Instead, it brought the case in the Northern District of Texas—a frequent court-shopping destination for conservatives looking for legal advantage—where it landed on the desk of Chief Judge Reed O’Connor. In addition to a lengthy track record of pro-conservative rulings, O’Connor has faced criticism for presiding over Musk-related lawsuits while personally owning Tesla stock. While O’Connor recused himself from a different 2024 case brought by X—Musk’s attempt to punish businesses for no longer buying ads on his platform—he declined to do so in the Media Matters case.

The new X terms of service specifically require that all cases involving the company be filed in the Fort Worth division of the Northern District of Texas. There are just three judges assigned to that division, including O’Connor. Because one is a senior-status judge with a reduced caseload, the odds of any case filed in that division being assigned to O’Connor are greater than one in three.

Media Matters has been fighting Musk’s maneuver to get the suit in front of O’Connor. In response to X’s lawsuit, they argued that, by suing in Texas, X had violated its own terms of service—which stipulated at the time that all disputes involving X be brought “solely in the federal or state courts located in San Francisco County” and under California law. Media Matters made the same claim in a countersuit filed against X in California. (In October 2024, Musk belatedly updated X’s terms of service to require all future litigation involving the company to be brought in North Texas.)

But a new change in X’s terms of service, announced last month and effective as of tomorrow, seems designed specifically to undercut Media Matters’ venue argument. Now, in addition to insisting that all new federal disputes be held in Judge O’Connor’s district, X is also attempting to bind its users to an agreement that all pre-existing U.S. disputes be litigated there as well. Here’s the relevant passage (emphasis added):

The choice of law and forum selection provisions of this paragraph shall apply to pending and future disputes and shall apply to your dispute regardless of when the conduct relating to the dispute arose or occurred.

Ongoing use of X requires ongoing assent to the company’s terms of service. In Media Matters’ case, that would mean providing Musk with a weapon to deploy against them in court. As a result, when the new terms go into effect tonight, Media Matters will stop all publishing on the platform. Their accounts won’t be deleted—Media Matters says it doesn’t want to free up the handles for impersonators or trolls—but there will be no further engagement on the platform from the nonprofit or its employees, according to a person familiar with the group’s thinking. Media Matters’ official account has nearly 415,000 followers on X; some of the organization’s most well-known personalities, like senior fellow Matthew Gertz, have hundreds of thousands.

Unsavory terms of service agreements are hardly unique to X. Most users breeze through such agreements without taking in a word; courts, on the other hand, have typically treated them as binding legal contracts. And tech companies habitually take full advantage, slipping in all sorts of self-dealing legal goodies: venue stipulations, caps on damages they can be sued for, requirements to solve disputes through arbitration rather than lawsuits, bans on class-action suits, and so on.

“This has been going on for like twenty years—not with X in particular, but with data privacy in general,” said Nancy Kim, a law professor and expert on contract law at Illinois Tech’s Chicago-Kent College of Law. “We’re just getting our rights slowly eroded, and these platforms are just increasingly getting more and more powerful, and they’re doing this through terms of service.”

But X’s conduct stands out for a few reasons. For one, there’s the obviously personal nature of the proposed changes. The lawsuit against Media Matters is a personal hobbyhorse of Musk’s, who has repeatedly described the organization as “pure evil,” “evil incarnate,” “evil to its core,” a “scam,” and “a radical left propaganda machine.” Compared to the practices of other businesses, it’s significantly outside the norm for Musk—especially after having already made it harder for any future litigants to win in court against X—to further tinker with the terms of service to bolster his side in one particular set of ongoing lawsuits.

Then there’s the fact that X—for better or worse—still functions, in many respects, as a digital public square. Discourse there still sets the table for much of the political conversation in the rest of the country. Media Matters’ decision to stop posting means X will lose a significant voice pushing back on the monsoon of fact-agnostic MAGA infotainment that’s become ubiquitous on the platform.

As Musk’s endless campaign against Media Matters continues to show, the openness of that discourse rests on the whims of one crabby, strung-out, impetuous billionaire, whose devotion to the ideals of free and open communication tends to shrivel up quickly when it comes into tension with his various political campaigns, ideological beliefs, or personal vendettas. If Musk is willing to repeatedly revise X’s terms of service just to make it easier to punish Media Matters, what else might he do to restrict what was once regarded as a national, or even global, public square? And to what extent are other users who remain on the platform¹ enabling him to do so—and exposing themselves, perhaps, to liability of their own—by continuing to use it?

1. Full disclosure: The author of this article is still on X. You should follow him.