Elon Musk’s X Corp has accused the European Climate Foundation of helping an anti-hate speech campaign group conduct research against its rebranded Twitter platform.
The claim was made in a blogpost on Monday that alleged the ECF had given the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) access to Brandwatch, a software tool that allows organisations to monitor posts on Twitter, which Musk last month renamed X.
“The CCDH gained this access with the cooperation of the European Climate Foundation, which provided credentials to CCDH in violation of their contractual obligations to Brandwatch,” said the post.
X Corp is suing CCDH in a federal US court over claims that CCDH scraped the former Twitter platform for data and gained illicit access to Brandwatch. Responding to the legal complaint, CCDH has accused Musk of behaviour “straight out of the authoritarian playbook”.
In the lawsuit against CCDH filed last week, the then-unnamed entity that gave CCDH access to Brandwatch is included as a “Doe defendant” that “improperly shared its login credentials with CCDH”.
X’s lawyers claimed that the CCDH had used, “flawed methodologies to advance incorrect, misleading narratives”.
The filing from last week also said that several unnamed advertisers were no longer spending on the platform, paused advertising or decided to not reactivate campaigns, after reading CCDH’s work. According to the filing, this included large multinational corporations and that the cost of the advertising postponements had run into tens of millions of dollars.
Musk, who has described himself as a “free speech absolutist”, claimed in an interview with the BBC in April that hate speech and misinformation had decreased since he acquired the site for $44bn last October.
Imran Ahmed, the founder and chief executive of the CCDH, said last week that he had no plans to suspend its research into the spread of hateful content on the social media platform.
The organisation has regularly published research into the social media platform’s content since Musk’s takeover.
The European Climate Foundation, which funds global heating campaign groups, has been contacted for comment.
