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Notes -
Eh, I'm familiar with it, but I dunno if it's as good as it sounds.
Texas and Missouri have been poking at Media Matters over the Nov 2023 report claiming Twitter was running a bunch of ads alongside actual-nazi content. Twitter claims that, to do so, Media Matters had to go through some impressive hoops -- using older accounts following only the actualfa and major brands, generating massive numbers of ad views to cherry pick the bad combinations -- none of which were presented in the initial report.
Texas started their investigation just days after, but Media Matters was able to file in DC and get a preliminary injunction. Missouri started about a month later, currently trying to use jurisdictional stuff to avoid that same DC court from slapping them with a TRO.
I'm... not really happy with pretty much any part of this.
Both state investigations are premised, to the extent that they're premised at all, under the theory that MMFA defrauded its donors with this report. I can certainly believe that MMFA's writers were cackling with glee as they completely manufactured ad combinations -- this is the same corp that promoted a holocaust denier's false claims that a Texas State Senator had given him an interview until they got called out -- and maybe there's some smoking gun of them doing so for the donor revenue rather than hating Elon Musk, but I don't think anyone donating to MMFA would have held back their quarters because they were too mean or manipulative. At best, the state AGs are just using whatever law comes to hand, and while it's funny to see turnabout as fair play after Remington v Soto, it's not great for society. I don't even think it'll be effective (cfe Paxton injunction): these laws aren't swords that cut both directions, and neither is process-as-punishment.
On the other side, it's hard to see this as even-handed application of the law against Texas or Missouri, either. We have a major case before SCOTUS right now in NRA v Vullo about whether actual enforcement of a law in a way clearly meant to retaliate against and quiet political speech 'counts', and it's not some clear and obvious matter how SCOTUS will roll! Here, instead, simple investigation of violations of a facially neutral law are clearly wrong. The DC Court even has to go out of its way to separate this case from other cases involving Twitter and Paxton to explain why suddenly the normally-difficult preliminary injunction is both necessary and obvious.
There's ways to distinguish that previous case, and it's not even a Blue-Tribe friendly decision despite the 9th Circuit being involved, but hard to come up with a distinction broader than "2021 Twitter should have found someone willing to make a more specific declaration". It's very hard to see a distinction from the more common politically-driven investigations.
More immediately, I'm also skeptical that this lawsuit is the sole thing driving the firings at MMFA. Any legal case is expensive, and juggling multiple cases is even harder, but the Texas and Missouri lawsuits are early enough that they're not driving anywhere near the billable hours of Musk's civil suit. Compared to the normal ebb and flow of financial spending (MMFA gets almost all its contributions through Bonner, but the last leak points to a small number of major donors, which tends to be mercurial), there are a lot of other explanations.
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