Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the group Elon Musk is suing for defamation, will have its day in court on Thursday.
Last year, Elon Musk’s company X sued the CCDH, saying that it was “actively working to assert false and misleading claims about X.” Since it started in 2018, the charity has been studying how to find hate speech, extremism, and false information on social media sites. News outlets, including TechCrunch, often copy and paste its stories.
The CCDH wrote about more hate speech on X after Musk took over Twitter. They said that unbanned accounts, like neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin’s, could make the business millions of dollars from ads.
The CCDH will argue on Thursday that X’s lawsuit is pointless and does not follow the state’s anti-SLAPP law. This law was made to stop lawsuits that are meant to threaten or silence critics. X will defend the validity of its case, which also says that the CCDH used Brandwatch, a social media monitoring tool, to steal data and break its terms of service. They will be held in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco and streamed live.
The CCDH asked a judge to throw out the case against Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) at the end of last year. They wanted to change X’s claims under California law. Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, said that Musk, who is worth about $200 billion, was purposely slowing down the legal process to make the group’s legal bills go up.
In spite of our success, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its supporters have been working hard to spread false and misleading information about X and stop people from talking about it, X wrote on its own platform last year.
Musk is a party to the case and has said that the CCDH is “an evil propaganda machine” and “bronze tier psy ops” on X.
Last year, Musk brought a similar case against the left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America. He also threatened to bring another lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League over its reports of antisemitism on X. X is suing Media Matters for America in Texas, not California, which has rights against SLAPP lawsuits like California does.
Musk basically has an infinite amount of money, but the CCDH does have one trick up its sleeve. On the nonprofit’s legal team is the famous lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who is still on a high from her huge victory over former President Donald Trump in the E. Jean Carroll defamation claim.
The CCDH isn’t just interested in Twitter. The nonprofit group regularly releases studies that show concerning patterns on all major social media sites. These include reports of material related to eating disorders on TikTok, false information about climate change on YouTube, and violent threats against women on Instagram.
It’s possible that researchers who study hate speech and false information on social media would stop doing their work right away if the CCDH lost in court. In recent years, this body of study has been very important for shedding light on the big social networks, especially as tech companies try to hide the bad effects their platforms have on society and avoid rules that could hurt their ad businesses.
Also Read: Can Elon Musk Prevent X From Going Bankrupt?
Ahmed said, “This silly lawsuit is a textbook example of a rich, unaccountable company using the courts as a weapon to silence researchers who are just looking into how hate speech, false information, and extremism spread online.” “CCDH isn’t just fighting this case to stay alive; we know we’re standing up for the freedom of all independent researchers, academics, and journalists, even though the powerful are trying to attack us in ways that have never been seen before.”
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