Essentially the same argument: Due to the fact the HBO show was syndicated throughout the united states, he can file in the federal courts in e.g. Texas (usually the argument is something like “They damaged business relations/contracts in XYZ state, therefore we file in XYZ state”).
I answered a little more in detail in a different comment (https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/411563/-/comment/2556033) but to address the last point: They did file in federal court (specifically the federal district court in north texas).
The issue with the internet is that it did take place in texas as well: The news article was available in texas, so the news corp can be sued there. Basically the argument is: “Media Matters harmed X’s brand in texas using misleading information” (you can read their arguments for filing in texas under the “Jurisdiction and Venue” section of their filing).
Also remember that this is currently X’s wish list: Media Matters can file for a change in venue.
Edit: Quick update.
Looking at their filing, the case will probably fail under a motion for summary judgment: They basically agree with Media Matters that they did show ads under extremist’s posts. They simply argue that you need to push the twitter algorithm to its limits by doomscrolling for a long time until the algorithm fails. However, this doesn’t make any of the facts provided by Media Matters (https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/musk-endorses-antisemitic-conspiracy-theory-x-has-been-placing-ads-apple-bravo-ibm-oracle) wrong.
Surely a company should be governed by the laws of the state in which they are based
This is not true and wouldn’t make why sense: let’s say you are a delivery company and one of your drivers runs over a dog in Texas. The lawsuit can be filed in Texas, regardless of whether your company is in Texas, California, or even outside the united states. The place you are incorporated in doesn’t change the damages or laws you violated when running over the dog. Of course you can also move the venue to the state the company is based in.
You cannot (generally) move it to another state, since that state doesn’t even have jurisdiction over any part of the incident.
The internet is just special in the sense that really something that happened on the internet happened everywhere on earth at the same time, meaning any venue is a place where potential damages were accrued.
There are certain things you are allowed to use cookies for even without asking for permission (i.e. they wouldn’t even need to tell you about them). These are effectively the kinds of things that are necessary for your website to work in the first place: For instance if you have a dark and a light mode and you want people to change this even without logging in, another example is language settings (this is why sites like e.g. duckduckgo can have a “settings” tab despite the fact you are not logged into anything).
The rule-of-thumb is that everything that is directly related to the functionality of your website is fair even without asking (they are “essential”).
Of course the specifics are a little more tricky: For instance you could have a shop in which you can put things into your “shopping basket” without being logged in. This is fine since it’s core functionality. However, if you use that same cookie to also inform your recommendation algorithm, you could get into trouble. Another aspect is 3rd party cookies: These, while not theoretically always requiring permissions, in practice do need expressed permission since you, as the website host, cannot guarantee what happens with these cookies (and 3rd party cookies are, in general, an easy way to track users, which isn’t core functionality for most websites).
You cannot run Signal without “Signal - the company” existing. All of their systems are designed to be attached to one specific backend, namely the signal-run backend, meaning without re-engineering the existing infrastructure you cannot simply swap over.
As @kpw already mentioned, “Signal - the company” dying would involve a functional reset of everything: No contacts, no servers, no infrastructure. COULD you fork the thing and build you own system? Sure, but it would be functionally unusable since no one else would be using it, since everything relies on specifically the signal servers to function. A post-signal system could re-use some of their code (if it runs outside signal corp - “works on my machine” could be present in this project as well), but would need to rebuild the actual network.
This is in contrast to something like the matrix protocol: If a specific matrix instance goes kaput, you still have the overall network working. This means that even if an instance implodes, you would have an easy migration path since the matrix network itself persists.