Missouri AG files lawsuit against Media Matters over not cooperating with investigation

Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed a lawsuit against Media Matters for America for not turning over documents for an investigation into the group's alleged business fraud. 

“My office has reason to believe Media Matters used fraud to solicit donations from Missourians in order to bully advertisers into pulling out of X, the last social media platform dedicated to free speech in America, so we launched an investigation to get to the bottom of it,” Bailey announced this week. 

“Media Matters has a sordid history of refusing to cooperate with investigations. I’m not going to let this activist group stonewall us," he also said. 

Last year, Media Matters published an article titled "As Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content." 

The article showed the pairing of ads for major companies next to antisemitic posts. 

X sued as a result, alleging that the group manipulated the algorithm to create the ad pairings and omitted its methodology in a bid to falsely paint the pairings as common and scare off its advertisers.

Bailey notified Media Matters of a pending investigation that alleged the group committed fraud "to solicit donations from Missourians in order to trick advertisers into pulling out of X."