Elon Musk's X is suing a hate-speech watchdog. And it's ready to fight back

As It Happens6:50Hate-speech monitoring group won't back down amid lawsuit by Elon Musk's X

The company formerly known as Twitter is suing an organization that monitors hate speech on the platform, claiming its research has led advertisers to flee and the company to lose millions of dollars.

The lawsuit, filed by Elon Musk's X Corp. against the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), demands unspecified damages.

The suit claims that both the American and British iterations of the CCDH are "activist organizations masquerading as research agencies, funded and supported by unknown organizations, individuals and potentially even foreign governments with ties to legacy media companies." 

X says the CCDH wants the platform to become "an ideological echo chamber that conforms to CCDH's favoured viewpoints."

Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the CDDH, says the filing reads "like a sort of a fever dream conspiracy theory."

He spoke to As it Happens guest host Peter Armstrong about the suit, here is part of their conversation. 

X did not respond to a request for comment regarding their conversation.

Elon Musk is at the centre of so many news stories these days. How does it feel to be in his crosshairs?

We're used now to the way that he deals with critics with things like lawfare — trying to sue us out of existence. The truth is that Mr. Musk deserves to be scrutinized. Every business does. Every business needs to be transparent. Every business needs to be held accountable for any harms that they may create. 

When you've got a platform like X, which has impacts on our psychology, on our families and our democracy, well, they really need to be held accountable. And that's all that we've been trying to do. 

He has an indisputably powerful megaphone. He's called your organization evil. He's called you specifically a rat. How does that land? 

Well, we take it in our stride. And he has since escalated to taking legal action against us, which he hopes will bleed us dry of money. But the truth is that we're up for the fight. 

The first thing I did when I received a legal letter from Mr. Musk's attorney was I called our lawyer. I spoke to her and she said these are baseless claims and you should relax about it. And so I did. I went to see Barbie. 

We'll continue to do our research. We won't be put off by Mr. Musk. Worse still for him, we're going to double down because we know that it's important to hold him accountable, especially when he least wants to be held accountable.

The lawsuit says that you're advancing misleading information and that has caused X to lose advertisers. Give me some examples of the kinds of hate speech that the CCDH has found in that research about X. 

Mr. Musk makes a lot of claims. He says that we're funded by the government, we are funded by social media companies, which is utter nonsense. In fact, the lawsuit itself reads like a sort of a fever dream conspiracy theory. 

But let me tell you about our research. When Mr. Musk took over Twitter, we used tools to work out whether or not the frequency of extreme slurs, anti-Semitic slurs, slurs against black people had increased or decreased after he took over. What we found was a 400 per cent increase, for example, in the use of the N-word. We found substantial increases in transphobic, homophobic, misogynist and anti-Semitic language being used on X.

Another study we did looked at what happens to the new Twitter Blue accounts on X. We had to look at whether or not the rules are being enforced on [Blue subscribers]. We took in 100 bits of extreme hatred, people saying things like gay people should be shot and killed, and then we reported it to the platform using their own reporting tools. The next day we went back and audited what action had been taken and found that 99 times out of 100, no action was taken against extreme hatred spouted by X users. 

As you say, you can understand why advertisers would want to stay away from a platform that has seen these substantial increases.

Well, and that's precisely what the Center for Countering Digital Hate was set up to do. We seek to make sure that hate and disinformation are no longer profitable. It's a market solution to a market problem. Hate and disinformation in the social media age have become profitable for these companies. And so they have a disincentive for taking action on it. 

Now, what we did by doing our research, which we put out in the public domain, Mr. Musk claims that that led advertisers to flee the platform and cost him tens of millions of dollars a year. 

This isn't anyone else's fault but Mr. Musk's, who has made a series of decisions as CEO that have led to the catastrophic collapse of his advertising business. 

X claims the organization has used what it calls illegal means to put this data together. Are you confident that you'll be able to stand by these methods if this goes to trial? 

We're incredibly confident that we'll be able to defeat this lawsuit. Look, they're casting around for some way to attack us. And we look forward to the opportunity to finally show that Mr. Musk — rather than being the free speech absolutist he claims to be — is in fact a thin-skinned man who is incapable of taking criticism, incapable of looking into himself for the solution to his own problems, and therefore is childishly lashing out against watchdog groups that seek to protect people, families and our democracy.

I understand you have a personal reason this work is important to you. Can you tell me about that? 

I set up the Center for Countering Digital Hate because of the murder of my colleague, Jo Cox, [British] member of parliament, by a white supremacist terrorist who was radicalized by content in part online. 

What became clear to me was that the primary place that we share information, that we negotiate our values, we negotiate even the information that we call facts, was shifting to these online spaces. I think traditional institutions didn't understand how to use them.

When I set this up, politicians and the media really weren't getting it. It was bad actors that were able to weaponize it. And that's why we set up CDDH. And it was born from a moment of extreme grief.

But you know, what I found along the way is that so many other people care about what we do, whether it's parents who care about the impact of algorithms on their children or it's people who work in the climate movement or work in other spaces in which disinformation is seriously undermining our ability to to have serious discussions about the problems that face us collectively as people.