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Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 16, 2023.
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CNN
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Nonprofit online watchdog the Center for Countering Digital Hate fired back against Elon Musk’s X on Thursday in a motion to dismiss the social media company’s August lawsuit.
X Corp., the parent company of the platform formerly known as Twitter, accused the Digital Hate Center of deliberately trying to drive advertisers away from hateful content. X’s lawsuit specifically claims that CCDH violated Twitter’s terms of service and federal hacking laws, by scraping data from the company’s platform and encouraging an anonymous person to collect inappropriate information on Twitter that he had provided to a third-party brand monitoring provider.
CCDH claims
“At bottom, X Corp.’s grievance is not that the CCDH defendants collected public data in violation of obscure (and largely imaginary) contractual terms, but that they criticized X Corp. (forcefully) of the public,” the filing states. .
X and a lawyer representing the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the CCDH filing Thursday.
After Musk acquired the social media platform just over a year ago, the CCDH — in addition to other researchers And online safety groups — released a series of reports criticizing the company’s handling of hate speech, including evidence, for example, that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric had surged under the leadership of Musk and that the platform monetized some previously banned but then reinstated accounts that posted hateful content.
In a blog post published by X after filing its complaint, the company said the lawsuit aimed to promote freedom of expression and that it “rejects all claims made by the CCDH.”
Musk blamed CCDH and other watchdog groups for X’s declining ad revenue. The billionaire in September accused the Anti-Defamation League of being the reason the company’s advertising revenue remained down 60%, despite X’s efforts to promote new brand safety checks for advertisers. In his complaint against the CCDH, X claims to have lost “at least tens of millions of dollars” in advertising revenue.
However, after Musk’s takeover, some advertisers have expressed their concerns on the massive layoffs that affected their contacts within the company or on the general uncertainty about the future of the platform; other brands have suspended spending after their ads were shown alongside hateful content. The owner of X himself has also been a controversial topic on the platform – last month, in a post that was later deleted, Musk encouraged users to follow the war between Israel and Hamas by following an account known for spreading disinformation. Just this week, Musk agree with an anti-Semitic post on Xendorsing the claim that Jewish communities promote “hatred against white people.”
CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed told CNN that the group’s response to X’s lawsuit aims to “show that this doesn’t intimidate us.”
“Ironically, he doesn’t want a free market of ideas when he claims to be his free market of ideas,” Ahmed said. “CCDH’s research has held up a mirror to Elon Musk’s increasingly toxic and ugly platform, and rather than do the right thing and address the hate and lies that disfigure X, M “Musk instead chose to sue the mirror,” he added.
In addition to its motion to dismiss, CCHR’s filing also includes a motion to strike most of X’s claims under California’s “anti-SLAPP” law, which could require X to prove that it is likely to win his claim before the case can move forward and could allow for an expedited dismissal if X’s lawsuit is found to be related to CCHR protected speech.
Among the allegations in X Corp.’s complaint, the company accuses CCDH of breach of contract for allegedly violating the platform’s terms of service by “scraping X for data” for a report. CCDH said in its motion to dismiss that the group had actually used “the platform’s own search function to collect publicly available information.” The CCDH also notes in its filing that despite X’s allegations that the group’s research cost the platform advertising money, the company “has not filed a defamation complaint.”
“This is understandable, since he cannot claim that the CCDH defendants said anything knowingly false, nor does he wish to invite the discovery of the truth about the content of his platform,” says the file filed Thursday by the group. “Instead,
