In the ongoing battle for free speech, picking sides should be easy. If you genuinely love your right to speak freely, you should side with those who seek to uphold that right absolutely rather than those who seek to restrict it, to undermine it, to make it conditional.

Elon Musk and his X platform belong to the former group, while the George Soros-funded leftists at Media Matters belong to the latter group — those who seek to silence speech they disagree with while promoting themselves as “media watchdogs” and claiming to fight “hate speech” and “disinformation.”

This battle is now exemplified in a lawsuit filed by Musk on behalf of his X platform against the misleadingly named Media Matters for America. The suit alleges that the so-called watchdog group had defamed his platform and was trying to scare advertisers away from it by way of a fraudulent report showing that ads from major advertisers on X were being positioned next to pro-Nazi and white nationalist content. As the Associated Press reports: “IBM, NBC Universal and its parent company Comcast said last week that they stopped advertising on X after the Media Matters report said their ads were appearing alongside material praising Nazis. It was a fresh setback as the platform tries to win back big brands and their ad dollars, X’s main source of revenue.”

Based on the AP’s reporting, it’s hard to blame these advertisers. After all, they have billions tied up in their brand images, and they don’t want to damage them through association with such noxious content.

But is it true? Are these advertisers really being served up next to Nazi propaganda?

No. That’s the short answer. The longer answer is spelled out by Musk in a post that promised a “thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.” As Musk explains:

To manipulate the public and advertisers, Media Matters created an alternate account and curated the posts and advertising appearing on the account’s timeline to misinform advertisers about the placement of their posts. These contrived experiences could be applied to any platform.

Once they curated their feed, they repeatedly refreshed their timelines to find a rare instance of ads serving next to the content they chose to follow. Our logs indicate that they forced a scenario resulting in 13 times the number of ads served compared to the median ads served to an X user. Of the 5.5 billion ad impressions on X that day, less than 50 total ad impressions were served against all of the organic content featured in the Media Matters article.

This, then, was a dirty trick, and Musk caught them red-handed.

To be clear, Media Matters will never be confused with a legitimate watchdog organization nor a patriotic one — at least not by anyone who’s paying attention. For years, the raison d'etre of these hacks was to obsessively watch Fox News and harass its advertisers by calling out the network for inaccuracies that are often sensationalized or taken out of context. But when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, exposed the speech-suppressing rottenness at its core, and repositioned it as a platform dedicated to protecting and promoting the marketplace of ideas, Media Matters declared war. Thus, the attempt to fraudulently manipulate X’s advertising data and scare off its advertisers, whose revenue is its life’s blood.

If X wins its lawsuit, it will have achieved a twofer: It will have protected free speech and smashed one of its greatest threats. Everyone who values free expression should be rooting for Musk.

As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson writes: “Anyone who cares about free speech and self-government should hope Media Matters gets sued and fined into oblivion. It’s a cancer on our civic life, masquerading as a nonprofit watchdog when its only purpose is to censor and throttle free speech by any means necessary. The sooner it’s gone, the better off the country will be.”

Indeed, the Left suppresses free speech not merely because it wants to but because it has to. As we’ve noted time and again: Leftists wouldn’t have to censor us if they weren’t afraid of losing the argument.