Musk joins the right-wing legal crusade against tech researchers
LITIGIOUS ELON AND THE WAR ON RESEARCH
Another social media research organization is being sued this week, this time by the company formerly known as Twitter. On Monday, X filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that tracks violent and hateful speech on social media. X claims that the research organization violated its terms of use when it scraped data from the platform, among other allegations.
Much of the filing focuses on the impact that the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s research has had on advertising and, by extension, on X’s bottom line. The group regularly uses its findings to pressure big brands to stop buying ads on X because showing ads next to tweets filled with racist speech and political disinformation is generally regarded as bad for business. This increasingly popular tactic among tech-focused civil rights advocacy groups in the U.S. has proven powerful and may indeed be one reason that X’s ad revenues have plummeted since Musk took over.
The court filing and the company’s all-but-incomprehensible blogpost about the lawsuit say plenty about how this strategy threatens X’s business model. But the company also argues, as Musk so often does, that X is simply trying to protect people’s rights to free speech and that the researchers want to undermine it. Nevermind that hate speech and threats of violence are routinely deployed as silencing tactics by trolls of many stripes, including Musk himself. The filings also make many mentions of the organization’s focus on trying to reduce online disinformation about topics like Covid vaccines, reproductive healthcare and climate change. X argues that this aspect of the group’s work is driven by ideology, when in reality, it is driven by hard facts. Covid vaccines work, reproductive healthcare is a human right, and climate change is real.
The case against the Center for Countering Digital Hate is all too similar to the spate of legal threats recently brought against members of the Election Integrity Partnership, a research coalition assembled around the 2020 election in the U.S. that included the Stanford Internet Observatory, the German Marshall Fund and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, among others. These research groups were focused on tracking election-related disinformation — including state-run accounts promoting false information about who won the 2020 election — and alerting social media companies. When Twitter was still Twitter and Elon Musk was just a foul-mouthed super user of the site, the company actually did try to reduce demonstrably false information about voting rights and election outcomes. Right-wing politicians and magnates like Musk have long leaned on the argument that this infringes on people’s rights to free speech. But even now, when Musk is at the helm of this rapidly disintegrating but still very influential platform, he can’t seem to get enough. So he’s taking this comparatively tiny research group to court.