CCDH vs. Musk: The Attack on Musk and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), and Comment on Musk’s Twitter

After threatening to sue Microsoft over accusations it “trained illegally using Twitter data,” the company sent a letter to Meta claiming its Threads app copied Twitter. But all this is just a lot of talk and no action so far, although it’d be somewhat entertaining to see how well Twitter’s claims hold up in court.

CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed said the lawsuit was an attempt to “silence” the group for its research. “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,” Ahmed said in a statement. “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.”

Musk’s X has accused the nonprofit of conducting a scare campaign to drive away advertisers.

It also comes at a time when right-wing activists are accusing researchers of trying to control the internet.

CCDH: Twitter is No More Homogeneous than it Used to be: Insights into the Public, Critics, and Observer-Inspired Phenomenology

Musk frequently uses heavy-handed tactics to take aim at critics. Several journalists who were suspended for covering the company were restored days later, after pressure from press freedom advocates. He banned the user who posted about his jet’s movements from using publicly available information and suspended several of them. He hired a private investigator to dig into a British man who criticized Musk for helping to rescue the boys’ soccer team.

Twitter disputes the claim that hateful content is on the rise, saying views of such posts have declined. “Free expression and platform safety are not at odds,” the company wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Since Musk bought the platform, there have been increasing levels of hate speech on it. white supremacists, far right extremists, and Qanon conspiracy theorists are back on the site after the entrepreneur loosened rules about what can be posted. The rapper and mogul had been suspended for posting an image of a swastika inside the Star of David, but over the weekend he was allowed to return.

Among the research that CCDH is best known for is a 2021 study showing that 12 people were behind most of the misleading claims and lies about COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.