In a company blog post yesterday, Elon Musk’s great social media experiment, X, (recently rebranded from Twitter), revealed that it is launching a lawsuit against online hate research group Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), alleging that the group has been “encouraging advertisers to pause investment on the platform” based on false and misleading claims.
“X is a free public service funded largely by advertisers,“ the company writes. “Through the CCDH's scare campaign and its ongoing pressure on brands to prevent the public’s access to free expression, the CCDH is actively working to prevent public dialogue.”
Political firebrand Musk acquired the company last October promising to loosen the social media platform’s content moderation policies, which have evolved immensely over the past few years with the advent of Qanon, vaccine denial and unfounded claims of 2020 election fraud. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic the company was forced to deal with a host of anti-vax conspiracy theories that spread rapidly through the platform, posing a serious public health risk and putting Twitter in an uncomfortable public spotlight. This along with a host of even more malevolent online activity, led to numerous radical voices being banned from the platform, including a former president.
Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has reinstated many of those accounts and slashed employee headcount in the content moderation area.
The result, as any marketing exec could have predicted, has been an exodus of big-name advertisers who don’t want their marketing messages displayed alongside potentially harmful content. Musk recently lamented that advertising is down 50% since he took the helm.
While Musk and his new CEO Linda Yaccarino recently touted steps the company has taken to give advertisers more control over where their ads are placed, a recent Bloomberg article cites CCHD director of research president Callum Hood saying that “Musk is not keeping his promises to advertisers, and their ads are appearing next to really harmful content.”
Hood claimed that during the first three months of Musk’s tenure, the rate of racial slurs against Black Americans tripled, while slurs against the LGBTQ+ community were up 119%. Hood said that he based his research on social-media analysis tool Brandwatch.
In its lawsuit, X alleges that “CCDH gained access to X's data without Brandwatch’s authorization, and that the purported CCDH ‘research’ cited in a Bloomberg article ‘contained metrics used out of context to make unsubstantiated assertions about X (formerly Twitter).’ ”
A lawyer for the CCDH responded to the claims with some teeth, saying: “If [X does] file suit, please be advised that CCDH intends to seek immediate discovery regarding hate speech and misinformation on the Twitter platform; Twitter’s policies and practices relating to these issues; and Twitter’s advertising revenue.”
A copy of X’s legal filing with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is available here.
