X, formerly known as Twitter, sued the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) on Monday, arguing that the nonprofit âembarked on a scare campaign to drive away advertisers from the X platformâ and illegally accessed the Xâs data. The lawsuit came days after Twitter unbanned Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, whom Musk kicked off the platform for tweeting a swastika in December.
The complaint claims that the CCDH illegally scraped Twitter data and âconvinced an unknown third party,â to share login credentials so the organization could access a private database. The lawsuit argues the CCDH then cherry-picked statistics from that data to make it appear as if X is overwhelmed by harmful content, and then used that contrived narrative to call for companies to stop advertising on X.
A large portion of Xâs legal complaint focuses on smearing the CCDH, rather than accusing it of lawbreaking. The lawsuit says the CCDH uses flawed research methodology and advocates for censorship, for example, neither of which are against the law. The lawsuit also goes out of its way to suggestâwithout evidenceâthat the CCDH receives some kind of shadowy funding from âunknownâ organizations âand potentially even foreign governments with ties to legacy media companies.â Based on Muskâs tweets about that question, it seems the billionaire may have made that accusation up out of thin air.
âElon
Muskâs latest legal threat is straight out of the authoritarian
playbook â he is now showing he will stop at nothing to silence anyone
who criticizes him for his own decisions and actions,â said Imran
Ahmed, CEO of the CCDH, in a statement. âThe Center for
Countering Digital Hateâs research shows that hate and disinformation is
spreading like wildfire on the platform under Muskâs ownership and this
lawsuit is a direct attempt to silence those efforts. People donât want
to see or be associated with hate, antisemitism, and the dangerous
content that we all see proliferating on X. Musk
is trying to âshoot the messengerâ who highlights the toxic content on
his platform rather than deal with the toxic environment heâs created. The CCDHâs independent research wonât stop – Musk will not bully us into silence.â
On July 18th, Musk called Ahmed a âratâ and described the organization as âtruly evilâ in a series of tweets.
The CCDH is a nonprofit and says it
doesnât accept funding from tech companies, governments, or their
affiliates. The organization regularly publishes research about hate
speech problems on social media. Last December, the organization found
that use of racial skyrocketed on Twitter
the same week that Musk congratulated his team for its success fighting
hate speech, for example.
In a letter sent to the CCDH, Muskâs lawyer Alex Spiro wrote that the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) âmade a series of troubling and baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter generally, and its digital advertising business specifically.â Spiro wrote that Twitter, which recently changed its name to X, has âreason to believeâ that the CCDH is âsupported by funding from X Corp.âs commercial competitors, as well as government entities and their affiliates.â Spiro did not respond to a request for
comment.
In the letter. Spiro said that X is investigating whether the CCDH violated section 43(a) of the Lanham Act, which prohibits false advertising. Itâs unclear how publishing research constitutes advertising, and ultimately it seems like X decided that, in fact, it does not. The lawsuit makes no mention of the Lanaham act. Instead, X suggests that the CCDH breached Xâs user agreements and broke the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Lol @ Elon Musk calling me a âratâ, calling the non-profit I run âevilâ.
Want to help us clap back?
Donate to @CCDHate, who do so much to hold him accountable and influence advertisersâŠ
(which is why heâs being so petulant)https://t.co/bPWdJ8ONhh pic.twitter.com/mlxrYQYGsU
— Imran Ahmed (@Imi_Ahmed) July 19, 2023
Musk treatment of Ye (formerly Kanye West) seems a perfect illustration of the CCDHâs arguments about Twitterâs attitude towards hate speech. Just before Muskâs takeover in October 2022, Twitter banned Ye for posting that he was âgoing death con [sic] 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.â Musk later unbanned Ye as well as a long list of other promoters of hate speech, misinformation, and Nazism. Ye then spent the next month on a bizarre and racist media tour, which included wearing a White Lives Matter shirt and an interview where he praised Hitler and said âI also love Nazis.â Muskâs tolerance for Nazism apparently ran out on December 2nd after Ye tweeted a picture of a swastika embedded in a Star of David. At the time, Musk tweeted that Yeâs account was suspended.
That isnât enough to earn yourself a permanent ban on Muskâs Twitter, thoughâor âXâ as he would prefer that you call itâat least not if youâre a famous conservative. Over the weekend, Twitter welcomed Ye back once again. The company told the Wall Street Journal that Ye is not allowed to monetize his account, and advertisements will not appear next to his tweets.
Ye isnât the only right-wing darling earning second and third chances from Elon Musk. Last week, Twitter banned Qanon conspiracy influencer Dom Lucre after he tweeted a picture depicting child sexual abuse so horrific that we wonât describe it here. The ban sparked outcry from conservative Twitter users, who are apparently more concerned about âcensorshipâ than protecting children. Musk then intervened and unbanned Lucreâs account. The image did not reappear.
âFor now, we will delete those posts and reinstate the account,â Musk tweeted. In reality, Twitterâs own metrics said Lucreâs post was retweeted more than 8,000 times and viewed by over 3 million people.
Lucre used his reinstated Twitter account to lie that he had never posted the image, falsely claiming he had only tweeted a link to a story which described the abuse. Muskâwho has a penchant for calling his critics pedophilesârecently tweeted that his company has a zero tolerance policy for child sexual abuse material, and has repeatedly praised his own efforts to protect child safety on Twitter.
Musk often refers to himself as a âfree speech absolutist.â That stance clearly extends to Nazis, peddlers of misinformation, and far right celebrities, but it doesnât seem to apply to the billionaireâs critics. Elon Musk gleefully censors Twitter users on a regular basis, often inventing new rules to justify his actions. For example, he updated Twitterâs doxxing policies in order to ban an account that tweeted about his private jet, and then banned a number of journalists for writing about the incident.
In fact, censorship has skyrocketed during Muskâs tenure when it comes to government requests. Governments often ask social media companies to take down posts or accounts they donât like. Before he took over, Twitter complied with about half of these requests. The numbers shot up under his leadership; these days, Elonâs Twitter cooperates with government censorship requests 80% of the time. To name one example, Twitter banned four accounts and took down 409 tweets at the request of Turkish President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄan just before the countryâs most recent election.
Update, August 1st, 4:05 pm EST: This article has been updated with details about the lawsuit.
