UPDATED: X, the Elon Musk-owned social service formerly known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “Despite our continued progress, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its backers have been actively working to assert false and misleading claims encouraging advertisers to pause investment on the platform. X is a free public service funded largely by advertisers. Through the CCDH’s scare campaign and its ongoing pressure on brands to prevent the public’s access to free expression, the CCDH is actively working to prevent public dialogue,” the company said in a blog post Monday.
According to X, social media analytics firm Brandwatch“made X aware that the CCDH gained access to X’s data without Brandwatch’s authorization, and that the purported CCDH ‘research’ cited in aBloomberg article‘contained metrics used out of context to make unsubstantiated assertions about X (formerly Twitter).’ Additionally, the CCDH has recently scraped X’s platform, which is a violation of our terms of service.”
X continued, “That’s why X has filed a legal claim against the CCDH and its backers.” The company said it “not only rejects all claims made by the CCDH, but, through our own investigation, we have identified several ways in which the CCDH is actively working to prevent free expression.” That includes allegedly “targeting people on all platforms who speak about issues the CCDH doesn’t agree with”; “attempting to coerce the deplatforming of users whose views do not conform to the CCDH’s ideological agenda”; “targeting free-speech organizations by focusing on their revenue stream to remove free services for people”; and “attempting to illegally gain unauthorized access to social media platform data and to misuse that data.”
A copy of X Corp.’s lawsuit against CCDH, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available at this link. The complaint accuses CCDH of breach of contract, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, intentional interference with contractual relations and inducing breach of contract. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages and an injunction barring CCDH from accessing, using or disclosing data provided by X/Twitter to Brandwatch.
In a statement Tuesday about the X/Twitter lawsuit, CCDH founder and CEO Imran Ahmed said: “Elon Musk’s latest legal move is straight out of the authoritarian playbook — he is now showing he will stop at nothing to silence anyone who criticizes him for his own decisions and actions. The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s research shows that hate and disinformation is spreading like wildfire on the platform under Musk’s ownership and this lawsuit is a direct attempt to silence those efforts. People don’t want to see or be associated with hate, antisemitism and the dangerous content that we all see proliferating on X. Musk is trying to ‘shoot the messenger’ who highlights the toxic content on his platform rather than deal with the toxic environment he’s created. CCDH has no intention of stopping our independent research — Musk will not bully us into silence.”
EARLIER: Elon Musk has taken legal aim at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an independent nonprofit research group, over the organization’s findings that since the multibillionaire acquired Twitter (now called X) hate, racism and disinformation on the social platform has substantially increased.
“Musk and his legal team, led by attorney Alex Spiro at Quinn Emanuel, have engaged in an aggressive campaign to intimidate, bully, and silence CCDH,” the organization said in a statement released Monday. “While Elon Musk proclaims to be a ‘free speech absolutist,’ his actions against CCDH show the lengths he will go to silence those who seek to hold him to account.”
The Center for Countering Digital Hate recently published findings that Twitter failed to take action against 99 of 100 Twitter Blue accounts the organization reported for hate-speech violations. A July 20 letter from Spiro to the organization called the CCDH’s research “false, misleading or both” and said X Corp., the platform’s parent company, is “investigating whether CCDH’s false and misleading claims about Twitter are actionable” under U.S. law prohibiting unfair competition. The company, he wrote, has “reason to believe” that the CCDH is “supported by funding from X Corp.’s commercial competitors, as well as government entities and their affiliates.”
“Twitter takes its commitment to free speech, the enforcement of its rules and policies protecting users, and its strong relationships with its advertising partners all extremely seriously,” Spiro’s letter said. “To the extent that CCDH is passing off as impartial ‘research’ material that is in fact being funded in support of an ulterior agenda, your representations are all the more misleading.”
Musk, in a post Monday about the brewing legal dispute, wrote, “Let’s pull the mask off this organization and see who is really behind it.”
In a letter dated July 31 to Spiro from Roberta Kaplan of Kaplan Hecker & Fink, which is representing CCDH, she wrote that the research group “will not be bullied by your clients.” Kaplan’s letter did not address the group’s sources of funding but said, “Your assertion that the goal in CCDH’s research and reporting is to benefit Twitter’s competitors… ignores the fact that CCDH has published critical, highly publicized reports about other platforms, including Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.”
“Your clients, of course, are free to pursue litigation if they choose to do so,” Kaplan wrote. “But they should be mindful of the risks involved in bringing frivolous claims to intimidate thoughtful critics and stifle legitimate commentary on issues of clear public interest. And they should also know that CCDH is fully prepared to defend itself and its ability to continue pursuing its public mission.”
If X Corp./Twitter decides to sue CCDH, Kaplan added in the letter, “please be advised that CCDH intends to seek immediate discovery regarding hate speech and misinformation on the Twitter platform; Twitter’s policies and practices relating to these issues; and Twitter’s advertising revenue. In that event, a court will determine for itself the truth of the statements in our client’s report in accordance with the time-tested rules of civil procedure and evidence.”
In its response, the CCDH also noted that Musk, in posts on Twitter, has called the organization “evil” and CEO Imran Ahmed a “rat.”
“Elon Musk’s actions represent a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research, in the desperate hope that he can stem the tide of negative stories and rebuild his relationship with advertisers,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said in a statement. “Advertisers are fleeing his platform for one clear reason: Elon Musk has supported the proliferation of hate and racism on it, and he doesn’t care to stop it. Musk is targeting CCDH because we reveal the truth about the spread of hate and disinformation on Twitter under his ownership, and it’s impacting his bottom line. CCDH will continue to hold social media companies that spread hate and disinformation online accountable to the public.”
Among the Center for Countering Digital’s research into Twitter, it has found that the volume of tweets containing slurs have risen by up to 202% since Musk’s takeover of Twitter; the number of tweets linking LGBTQ+ people to “grooming” have more than doubled over that time; and that paid-for verification is “helping spread disinformation.”
Musk has hired ex-NBCUniversal ad exec Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s CEO, hoping to reverse the company’s dramatic drop in ad revenue. In a July 15 tweet, Musk said Twitter’s cash flow remains negative because of an approximately 50% decline in advertising revenue and a heavy debt load.
Twitter/X has claimed that hate speech occurs at extremely low rates on the platform, and estimates that hate speech impressions have declined 30% since Musk took over Twitter in October 2022. “More than 99% of content users and advertisers see on Twitter is healthy,” the Twitter/X Safety account said in a July 18 post.
According to Twitter/X, it has applied warning labels to more than 700,000 posts violated its hateful conduct policy since April and that it “proactively prevent[s] ads from appearing adjacent to content that we label.”
Twitter said that in March 2023, it partnered with social-media management vendor Sprinklr to “understand, measure and reduce hate speech using its AI-based model and to further our commitment to create a brand-safe environment for our agencies and advertisers.”
According to the company, Sprinklr’s independent model showed that daily English-language hate speech impressions are “even lower than Twitter’s own model estimates.” Sprinklr estimated the average daily number of hate speech impressions vs. overall impressions to be 0.003% compared with Twitter’s estimate of 0.012% for the period of Jan. 1-May 31, 2023.
