Following through on a warning issued hours earlier, X Corp., the parent corporation of the social media network formerly known as Twitter, launched a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco on Monday targeting a nonprofit organization which monitors hate speech & disinformation.
The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, charges the Center over Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) of orchestrating a “scare campaign aimed at drawing away advertisers from the X platform” by publishing study findings alleging that the social media platform failed to take action against hateful posts. Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, owns the service.
According to the filing, the CCDH committed “a series of illegal activities designed to wrongly gain access to safeguarded X Corp. data, required by CCDH so that it might cherry-pick via the hundreds of millions of posts created each day on X as well as falsely claim it had statistical evidence showing that the site is overwhelmed with damaging content.”
The charity organisation is particularly accused of breach of contract, violation of federal computer crime law, intentional interference in contractual relations, and encouraging breach of contract in the lawsuit. The company’s lawyers requested a jury trial.
The lawsuit was brought forward just hours after the CCDH announced that Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, had given the group a letter on July 20 in which he stated that X Corp. was examining whether the CCDH’s “false & misleading claims regarding Twitter” were punishable under federal law.
CCDH founder and CEO Imran Ahmed took direct aim at Musk in a statement to NBC News, claiming that the SpaceX and Tesla tycoon’s “latest legal threat is a straight copy of the authoritarian playbook — he has recently demonstrated that he will stop at absolutely nothing to silence anybody who criticizes him for his individual decisions and actions.”
“The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s research indicates that hate and disinformation are spreading like flames on the platform under Musk’s ownership, and this lawsuit is an explicit attempt to silence those efforts,” Ahmed wrote. “Rather than dealing with the toxic environment he’s created, Musk is attempting to’shoot the messenger’ who spotlights the toxic content on his platform.”
“The CCDH’s independent research won’t stop — Musk will not threaten us into silence,” Ahmed concluded.
According to the research report, which attracted special ire from X Corp., the platform failed to take action on 99% of 100 posts detected by CCDH staff members that contained racist, homophobic, and antisemitic language.
Musk has been the subject of intense criticism since acquiring Twitter last year. Top extremist speech watchdog groups & activists have chastised him for relaxing controls on what may be posted on the platform, while business analysts have expressed concern about his sometimes erratic & impulsive decision-making.
The research of the Center for Countering Digital Hate has been highlighted by NBC News, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and many other news outlets.
Musk, who has been chastised for posting conspiratorial or incendiary comments on his personal account, has stated that he is acting in the cause of “free speech.” He has stated that he wants to turn Twitter to a “digital town square.”
Musk also stated that hate speech on the site was on the decline. Musk said in a tweet on Nov. 23 that “hate speech impressions” were down by one-third and provided a graph that appeared to be taken from internal data indicating a downward trend.