Yesterday we learned that Elon Musk’s X Corp, the rebranded Twitter, had sent a letter threatening to sue the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a UK based organization that pressures social media companies to remove allegedly hateful content and to censor specific individuals.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate uploaded screenshots of the letter to its website Monday under the heading, “Musk threatens CCDH with brazen attempt to silence honest criticism.” In the three-page letter, dated July 20, Musk’s lawyer described the organization’s research as “false, misleading, or both” and argued that its methodologies were flawed.

Elon Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, cited one research report claiming that Twitter had failed to take action against 99% of the 100 posts flagged by CCDH staff members for “tweeting hate,” including racist, homophobic and antisemitic content.

You can read about CCDH’s history here. As you’ll see, they seem to have been inspired by previous efforts by the group Sleeping Giants which targets the advertisers of right-wing companies. Here’s a bit of the letter Musk’s attorney sent to the CCDH:

CCDH regularly posts articles making inflammatory, outrageous, and false or misleading assertions about Twitter and its operations, which CCDH holds out to the general public as supported by “research.” CCDH fixes this label on its outlandish conclusions about Twitter despite failing to conduct (or even attempt) anything resembling the rigorous design process, analytical procedures, or peer review that a reasonable person would expect to accompany research product published by any reputable organization.

For example, last month CCDH posted an article claiming that “Twitter Fails to Act on 99% of Twitter Blue Accounts Tweeting Hate.” This claim was purportedly based on “[n]ew research show[ing] that Twitter fails to act on 99% of hate posted by Twitter Blue subscribers, suggesting that the platform is allowing them to break its rules with impunity and is even algorithmically boosting their toxic tweets.” Review of the article reveals that this “research” was limited to tasking CCDH staff to report 100 individual tweets as violations of Twitter’s rules, and then check whether those tweets had been removed or otherwise actioned four days later.

CCDH’s claims in this article are false, misleading, or both, and they are not supported by anything that could credibly be called research. The article provides no methodology for its selection or testing of tweets, no baseline for Twitter’s enforcement time frame, and no explanation as to why the 100 chosen tweets represent an appropriate sample of the nearly 500 million tweets sent per day from which to generalize about the platform’s content moderation practices. And despite purporting to conclude that Twitter favors Twitter Blue subscribers by allowing them to “break its rules with impunity,” the article provides no evidence of differing treatment in content moderation actions against Twitter Blue subscribers and non-subscribers, and indeed reflects no effort to conduct any testing to support this claim, which appears under its headline. The article cites no sources other than different, similarly threadbare posts on CCDH’s own website, and fails to identify the qualifications of any of the researchers who worked on the article. In other words, the article is little more than a series of inflammatory, misleading, and unsupported claims based on a cursory review of random tweets.

The letter, which is date July 20, ends by saying X Corp is “investigating” whether it can sue CCDH for misleading claims. Apparently that investigation didn’t take long because today we’re learning that X Corp has sued.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) of orchestrating a “scare campaign to drive away advertisers from the X platform” by publishing research reports claiming that the social media service failed to take action against hateful posts. The service is owned by the technology mogul Elon Musk.

In the filing, lawyers for X. Corp alleged that the CCDH carried out “a series of unlawful acts designed to improperly gain access to protected X Corp. data, needed by CCDH so that it could cherry-pick from the hundreds of millions of posts made each day on X and falsely claim it had statistical support showing the platform is overwhelmed with harmful content.”

The complaint specifically accuses the nonprofit group of breach of contract, violating federal computer fraud law, intentional interference with contractual relations and inducing breach of contract. The company’s lawyers made a demand for a jury trial.

X Corp announced its plans on its own blog last night.

Recently Brandwatch made X aware that the CCDH gained access to X’s data without Brandwatch’s authorization, and that the purported CCDH “research” cited in aBloomberg article “contained metrics used out of context to make unsubstantiated assertions about X (formerly Twitter).” Additionally, the CCDH has recently scraped X’s platform, which is a violation of our terms of service.

That’s why X has filed a legal claim against the CCDH and its backers. X not only rejects all claims made by the CCDH, but, through our own investigation, we have identified several ways in which the CCDH is actively working to prevent free expression. That includes:

• Targeting people on all platforms who speak about issues the CCDH doesn’t agree with.
• Attempting to coerce the deplatforming of users whose views do not conform to the CCDH’s ideological agenda.
• Targeting free-speech organizations by focusing on their revenue stream to remove free services for people.
• Attempting to illegally gain unauthorized access to social media platform data and to misuse that data.

So far the director of CCDH is talking tough:

“The truth is that he’s [Elon Musk] been casting around for a reason to blame us for his own failings as a CEO,” Ahmed said, “because we all know that when he took over, he put up the bat signal to racists and misogynists, to homophobes, to antisemites, saying ‘Twitter is now a free-speech platform.’ … And now he’s surprised when people are able to quantify that there has been a resulting increase in hate and disinformation.”

“All we do is hold up a mirror to the platform and ask them to consider whether or not they like the reflection they see in it,” Ahmed added. “What Mr. Musk has done is said, ‘I’m going to sue the mirror because I don’t like what I see.’”

I guess we’ll have to wait and see if their work holds up to scrutiny or if Musk and his attorneys have a point about the group presenting misleading claims. I read through one of their reports about Twitter the gist of which is that some advertisers are appearing near tweets that use the word “groomer.” The report focused on tweets by LibsofTikTok, Tim Pool, Chris Rufo, James Lindsay and Gays Against Groomers. In the view of CCDH, anyone who objects to transitioning children is a hater and they are clearly hoping that advertisers will agree and decide to pull their ad dollars from the site.