Elon Musk Sues Nonprofit For Making Him Break Twitter

Oh, sorry, for making him break ... X.

Remember when Elon Musk paid $44 billion dollars to buy Twitter so he could save free speech?

Yes, well, about that …

For the past nine months, Musk has been busy breaking Twitter, which before he made the world’s most expensive weed joke, was the website that set the agenda for American media. The site has become practically unusable, thanks to the new owner firing three quarters of the staff, ditching most content moderation, and boosting any Nazi willing to hand him $8. Ad revenue continues to plummet, with most companies leery of having their content next to the latest Catturd post. And to top it all off, Musk has ditched the company’s main asset, shooting the bird and marking its grave with a strobe-lit “X.”

Naturally the company has taken the obvious step to restore its corporate house. That’s right — it’s suing a non-profit which had the temerity to point out that the site has become plagued with hate speech since Musk took it over.

Yesterday “X Corp., a Nevada corporation,” sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate for breach of contract, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, intentional interference with contractual relations, and inducing breach of contract.

Defendants Center for Countering Digital Hate, Inc. (“CCDH US”) and Center for Countering Digital Hate Ltd. (“CCDH UK,” collectively “CCDH”) — activist organizations masquerading as research agencies, funded and supported by unknown organizations, individuals and potentially even foreign governments with ties to legacy media companies — have embarked on a scare campaign to drive away advertisers from the X platform. CCDH has done this by engaging in 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 goes on to accuse the CCDH of selectively quoting purloined data to gin up a “contrived narrative” to “prevent public dialogue and the public’s access to free expression in favor of an ideological echo chamber that conforms to CCDH’s favored viewpoints.”

What viewpoints would those be? Do you even have to ask?

CCDH uses those reports to demand that platform providers kick the targeted users off of their platforms, thus silencing their viewpoints on broadly debated topics such as COVID-19 vaccines, reproductive healthcare, and climate change.

It’s not that the world’s most divorced dad has made the site toxic by posting vile, transphobic shit all day long. It’s that a tiny non-profit in cahoots with “legacy media companies” and “even foreign governments” has embarked on a “scare campaign to drive away advertisers.” And so to protect free speech, X Corp is seeking “tens of millions of dollars” from a charity that said that advertisers might think twice about associating themselves with a site where hate runs rampant.

What are the odds that the “foreign government” is some token government grand funding for the UK arm of the charity, and the “legacy media” is the BBC?

The suit was filed in federal court in California, since the site’s terms of service dictate that all disputes will be adjudicated there. The company may live to regret this, however, thanks to the state’s very strong anti-SLAPP laws, which contain a fee-shifting provision for lawsuits designed to suppress speech on matters of public interest. And indeed the filing strongly suggests that what X Corp is exercised about is not the supposed breach of contract to enable the unauthorized access of proprietary data, but the things CCDH said about the company:

CCDH, in turn, and on at least two occasions after accessing that data without authorization, quoted the unlawfully accessed data incompletely and out of context to create unsubstantiated and incorrect assertions about the presence of hate speech on X.

See also:

CCDH, as a registered user of the X service, also breached its agreement with X Corp., i.e., the Terms of Service (“ToS”), which expressly prohibit “scraping” without X’s “prior consent.” CCDH’s February 9, 2023 report admits to scraping X to obtain data for the report, in which CCDH uses its manufactured and inaccurate narrative to openly call for companies to not advertise on X, claiming they would otherwise be “bankrolling the spread of hate and disinformation on Twitter.”

The gravamen of Twitter’s complaint appears to be that CCDH improperly accessed data from Brandwatch, a third-party company which allows advertising customers to “conduct brand monitoring on social media, customer research on opinions and trends, campaign planning and campaign effectiveness measurement, competitive analysis and risk management, influencer identification and market research, and audience segmentation and analysis.”

Twitter alleges that, after using improperly shared login data to access Brandwatch, CCDH then used it to write mean articles like a February 9, 2023, post entitled “Toxic Twitter,” in which the non-profit estimated that “just ten reinstated accounts renowned for publishing hateful content and dangerous conspiracies will generate up to $19 million a year in advertising revenue for Twitter.”

This appears to rely on a sentence in the article which says:

Finally, industry information from the social media analytics firm Brandwatch shows that Twitter ads cost an average of $6.46 per 1,000 impressions. Pulling these elements together results in a total figure of up to $19 million in estimated annual ad revenues across the accounts.

And perhaps CCDH did improperly access that data from Brandwatch. Or perhaps it gathered the information from this publicly available Brandwatch blog post in February of 2022. And perhaps even if they had improperly accessed the data, it would not be a tort to use it to write mean words about the dead bird, because that’s not how the First Amendment goes.

In summary and in conclusion, Elon Musk is a thin-skinned bully who cares no more about freedom of speech than he does about the safety of LGBTQ+ people. And fuck that guy for making Mark Zuckerberg look reasonable by comparison.

X Corp v. Center for Countering Digital Hate [Docket via Court Listener]

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