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The claim has several unique features. The judge rejected objections that the application was filed in a state in which neither X nor MMFA are headquartered – it was enough for him that the organization’s disclosure materials mentioned the Texas companies Oracle and AT&T. X is currently based in California, but the social network’s current office in San Francisco will soon close, and its owner Elon Musk is discussing moving the company to Texas.
And this is not a libel claim: X is not saying that MMFA made untrue statements. The management of the social network admits that the advertising was shown next to racist and other unacceptable materials. But it insists that this is rare and that the investigation’s authors “deliberately abused Platform X to force the algorithm to associate racist content with the brands of popular advertisers.” To do this, the MMFA deliberately created accounts in which they subscribed simultaneously to racists and the pages of large brands, after which they performed “endless scrolling and refreshing” so that new advertisements would pop up.